Publish and Perish, part 9: Even Lois Needs A Shrink?!

[Context: read the previous part or start from the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]

“Well, here we are again!” said Lois to Gerald, sounding slightly incredulous. They were standing inside Cafe Nation, the big campus coffee shop, where they had last met three months ago. She hesitated, then gave him a big hug (leading with her increasingly pregnant belly), then sat down. “How’ve you been, Gerry?” Her tone was serious, concerned, possibly a bit fearful. “No, scratch that — I know how you’ve been, more or less. How are you doing right now?”

“Well –” he interrupted himself. “Do you want the press release, or the gritty documentary?” he asked.

“No sugar-coating,” she said. Her eyes flitted toward the baristas. “Give it to me black.”

“OK, then,” he began. “Physically, I suppose I’m feeling about as good as can be expected. I’m walking a lot — which is not as exciting as, say, basketball, but feels pretty good.” He sighed. “But if you want to know the truth, I’m not … I’m not feeling the gratitude that would seem appropriate for my situation — for my good fortune. I’m mostly fretting about not being done with the book chapter that I was supposed to write this fall, and not having any thesis students — since they were reassigned when I was about to die — and not being ready for spring teaching.” He sighed. “It’s like I survived a big scare, but didn’t learn anything from it. I’m sort of wondering … whether I should see a therapist.” He trailed off sheepishly.

“Well, that’s an easy one!” she shot back. “You definitely should.”

He smiled. “Well, OK, then, Dr. Chernoff! Care to elaborate?”

“That’s not meant as a judgment of you,” she explained. “It’s just that I’ve been in therapy for years. I’m not sure I would have survived in academia without it.”

“Really?” The admission took Gerald by surprise. “I mean, I’m not judging you, either, it’s just, well, your career seems to be going amazingly well, and, also, you seem to have a strong network of friends and family, which, I don’t know, might obviate your need for a therapist?”

She was nodding. “It’s true — I do have good support. My people have an intuitive sense of my blind spots and my needs. But, as someone who works in higher education, I believe that education matters too! Being a therapist isn’t just careful listening and gentle encouragement; there are professional skills that therapists learn and hone.”

“I suppose,” Gerald said. He was trying to process this. “I wonder if this is sort of like the difference between being a good friend and being a good teacher.”

“Uh… maybe?” she said.

“Our students sometimes incorrectly think of us as their friends, right?” he said.

“Right…”

“That’s partly because we try to be friendly and do things that friends do. But we also have professional skills that go beyond being nice, and we have professional boundaries that you wouldn’t necessarily enforce with pure friends.”

“Oh, OK, yeah,” she said. “I think I see the analogy. You’re answering my Venn diagram with another Venn diagram.” She smiled. “I think there’s decent overlap between the two.”

“Yeah — it’s a Meta-Venn. Or a Mega-Venn,” he quipped.

“Not bad. Anyway, you can see, in principle, how you and me having coffee might superficially resemble a therapy session, but might not be as helpful to either of us as an actual therapy session.”

“I suppose,” said Gerald again. “It’s just that… if you don’t mind, could you maybe give me an example of a specific problem that you were unable to resolve on your own, where a therapist made a difference?”

“Well, I could tell you what first drove me to therapy,” she said. “Do you remember how I did my postdoc with Karl van Driessen at UCSF?”

“Kind of,” Gerald. “He was a really big name even then, wasn’t he?”

“Yes — big name, big lab, big grants. But not so big on work-life balance. Anyway,” she continued, “he was being really demanding — not mean, exactly, not rude, but really demanding. Meanwhile, Matt and I were getting really serious, talking about academic job searches and kids and stuff. Most of those conversations turned out well, but they were very stressful too. Lots of ‘how much should I sacrifice for this person?’ and ‘how much should I sacrifice for this job?’ And then, to top it off, my mom had just died, and my dad was … not handling it well. By which I mean he was making epically bad decisions about courtship and marriage.”

“Geez,” said Gerald.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I could have handled one of those things, or maybe two, by thinking hard and talking with friends as usual. But with all three, I felt overwhelmed.”

“So you sought out a therapist?”

“Sort of, eventually. It was actually my dad — displaying the levelheadedness that was eluding him elsewhere — who told me I should go. I tried to make a pact with him — ‘I’ll go if you go’ — but he rejected that, so eventually I just went anyway.”

“So that was … about a decade ago,” Gerald said. “I hope things have gotten easier for you since then!”

“Oh, definitely! The worst period lasted about a year, and then ever since then, life has felt much more manageable.”

“And yet,” Gerald noted, “you’re still in therapy, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s mostly just a monthly prophylactic kind of thing,” she explained. “So if the stars misalign, and I suddenly get invited to serve on a dissertation committee AND join an editorial board AND organize a conference session, and if I’m tempted to say yes to all of those, it’s helpful for me to imagine reporting that to my therapist, and to imagine how pissed she’ll be. In fact, that’s how I enter the appointments in my calendar: t-h-e-r-a-p-i-s-s-e-d.”

“Thera-pissed. I like it!”

“So, what do you think, Gerry? Are you ready to give it a try yourself?”

“Maybe,” said Gerald earnestly. “But first, there’s at least one book I need to read.”

[Update: the story continues with part 10.]

Thanks to Katie Davis and Leila Zelnick — neither of whom is a direct model for Lois or any other character — for sharing ideas that informed this chapter.