Good morning.
The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, two hours before her appointment.
The subject line read: "Returning to private life — a note from Dr. M."
The woman who received it — I will call her Helen — read it on her phone in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's in Minneapolis, with a bag of frozen dumplings in the passenger seat slowly thawing.
The note was warm. Three paragraphs. It thanked Helen for two years of trust.
It explained that Dr. M had, in fact, retired from her practice in early 2024. All her active clients had been transferred to a colleague at that time — a colleague Helen had been speaking with weekly ever since.
Helen read the note three times.
She had not been speaking weekly with a colleague.
She had been speaking weekly with Dr. M. By video. Every Tuesday. At 6 p.m. For two years.
Or, more accurately: she thought she had.
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Dr. M is 68. White. Shoulder-length gray hair. Reading glasses she frequently misplaces.
Dr. K — the actual therapist, the one who had inherited Helen's Tuesday 6 p.m. slot — is 43. Black. Short hair. A small tattoo on the inside of her left wrist that says, in cursive script, the word "still."
Helen had sat across from Dr. M in person, every week, for two years before the retirement. She knew what Dr. M looked like.
What Helen saw on Zoom — for two years following Dr. M's retirement — was Dr. M.
Nobody can fully explain this.
The most charitable interpretation: her brain filled in what it expected to see.
The sessions were, by any reasonable measure, helpful. Helen wrote a book. She left a marriage that was not working. She reconnected with a sister she had not spoken to in eight years.
She did all of this while believing she was speaking to a 68-year-old woman with shoulder-length gray hair and reading glasses she frequently misplaced.
The therapy worked.
Helen does not know what to do with this.
Read what Dr. K — the actual therapist — knew, and what Helen has done in the eight weeks since →
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Talk Tuesday!
Margot
Editor, Wattalife