6. You Won't Understand Jump to 6. You Won't Understand
We don't complain to a doctor. We report to her.
We complain to a friend.
We report to a doctor. As clearly as we can because we believe by doing so she might have a solution to the trouble in our head.
I think this reporting to a doctor is like complaining to a friend. Which we do with unabashed, rather hungry, eagerness because, why, this is a listening friend!
A listening friend.
What happens to a folk who's convinced such a thing as a listening friend doesn't exist?
"A listening friend? That's a thing. A relic that can be imagined. Too in the past to be felt and believed to be." His words.
This guy cannot even report to a doctor.
Even when he finally opens the consulting room door and makes himself enter... He doesn't sit. He leans on the weight of his fat palms on her desk. His now teary eyes lock into her serious but patient, waiting ones.
Would she really understand? No one listens. Neither would she! No, she wouldn't understand!
Then he breathes and says to her what no one ever says to a doctor, "doctor, you won't understand. I'll rather just..."
The doctor surprised him, though. Because she became very human, friendly, kind, gentle, and his most-hated word "listening." She said, "I will. I listen. Talk to me, bro."
I think it's the doctor's job to listen in order to diagnose in order to prescribe and treat in order to make well in order to make money...
It's what he saw, too. That this was just a woman doing her job. No, she wouldn't listen. It's her job to pretend to. No one listens.
So he brought back home the same troubled head, perhaps worse now than when we managed to go to hospital.
Would he be killed by this thing?
If death mattered, he thought, people would listen.