The Most Helpful Thing My Therapist Ever Said To Me When I Was Single
Some people think therapy is a crock of shit; others have found a therapist who showed them the light and relief of helpful, effective talk therapy and are forever changed because of it.
I’m the latter.
I’ve been seeing my therapist on and off for several years now. I’ve even sent a few good friends to her over the years (they asked; I didn’t suggest, I swear). She has seen me super high, super low, and every emotion in between. There have been and still are times where I don’t have much to say and we end the session early; on the contrary, there are times where I have so much to say that I wish I had booked back-to-back sessions. The ebb and flow is a part of the process of therapy, I believe.
If you’ve ever been in therapy, you know the cardinal rule is they never actually tell you what to do. It sucks. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t know this was the drill. I went into therapy years ago fully believing he/she was going to tell me exactly what to do and how to solve my problems. I expected a paint by numbers guide, TBH. I didn’t realize talk therapy is an exercise in learning how to solve your own shit by figuring out what and why your shit is. Color me surprised.
I can’t compute the amount of times I walked into her office, sat on her couch and just started sobbing out of sheer frustration and sadness when I was, what felt like, hopelessly and endlessly single. I have a decade worth of dating disappointments which are what I’m working on writing out, story by story, for a book so I keep the details to a minimum on my blog. But trust me when I say, I had a lot of reason to feel that hopelessness. Being single in the 21st century (or really any time) can be all kinds of lonely. Of course, it entirely depends on your circumstances and situation. For me, I was the only single friend left out of my core group of four best girlfriends in the great state of Texas that is all for marrying younger, harder, and faster. This didn’t bode well for me. Dallas is also a very terrible place to date. I know that’s what everyone has to say about their chosen city, but seriously—it’s really bad out here.
All that to say, I had some seriously low moments that I would bring with me into therapy. We would sit there and rack our brains about how I could possibly meet someone worthy outside of a tired and exhaustive dating app. I lamented over and over about how I just wanted to meet someone naturally (or IRL as the kids say). I wanted my meet-cute moment at the grocery store or when I brought a book to a bar like a manic pixie dream girl, hoping some Joseph Gordon-Levitt type would approach me a la 500 Days Of Summer (I only did this once and it lasted maybe an hour. It was also Harry Potter. No one talked to me. I hate myself). At some point, we ran out of ideas. I remember one session in particular where I was sharing my deepest fear that this was it. This is my life. It’s a pretty good life in regards to friends and family and job, but I will always have that missing piece that I yearn for so badly. Every day is the same. Nothing changes. I wake up, go to work, come home, go to bed and do it all over again the next day, and that’s my life from now until forever. I have no romantic prospects, nothing sexy and exciting. This is it. I will never know what love is.
Depressing shit, I know. But that’s where I was at.
And that’s when my therapist said the most helpful thing to my very single self. She challenged me to shift my perspective and said that I should wake up every day and
“expect to be surprised.”
Instead of waking up full of dread and anxiety about another unexciting day in which I most likely won’t meet the love of my life, she suggested I wake up and simply “expect to be surprised.” Now, this way of thinking isn’t exclusive only in relation to men and dating. In fact, because my entire life at the moment felt pretty monotonous, this phrase was applicable in every aspect. “Life can seem boring and more of the same,” she insisted. “But it’s all about perspective. If you can start each day with a sense of wonder and positive anticipation, you might end up being surprised.”
Now I’m not one for daily mantras. I’ve tried to get into that flow, but my inner demons and negative self-talk are just too powerful (thusly why I’m still in therapy). But this “expect to be surprised” hit different. Something inside me shifted. Not drastically but enough to cling to this way of thinking for dear life. I wrote it down on a post-it and stuck it on my bathroom mirror so I was reminded of it every morning. At this point, I’m sure you’re hoping for a big reveal like “and wouldn’t you know, one month later, I met Zac!” but this was back in 2018 so there was much more heartache to be had in the form of Aggies, pencil dicks, screwed up Marines, and more. Regardless, the perspective of waking up every day and reminding myself that while, yes—life can seem tedious and never-changing and hopeless and shitty, it can also be as equally surprising and delightful and fun if you just put a different filter over it, and we’re good at that, right?!
Don’t get me wrong—as someone who’s prone to negative thinking, I nor you should expect to wake up every day expecting to be surprised. But I’m willing to bet you haven’t yet, and you gotta start somewhere. And please remember: this isn’t just in relation to dating. You should expect to be surprised in any facet of your life. You don’t know what’s going to happen, who you might meet, what you might see, etc. I think this is where my deep love for oversharing and over-communicating comes from. I love telling stories, and I fully believe that there is a story in every day even if you feel like absolutely nothing happened. Like Seinfeld, I find it exciting to make something out of nothing. To turn the ordinary into extraordinary. As the late John Prine once sang,
“How the hell can a person
Go to work in the morning
Then come home in the evening
And have nothing to say?”
If you wake up every day and expect to be surprised, there’s no way you won’t have something to say at the end of the day. I can promise you that.
