Sometimes we all just need someone to be there and listen
When you turn up to do a celebrity interview, you never know how it’s going to go. A famous actor known for their openness and jollity might greet you four hours into their film junket with a headache and growling list of notes on the conduct of your newspaper. They might be exhausted after fielding six previous interviewers’ questions about their divorce, and unwilling or unable to perform warmth for even one more journalist. Even with decent wifi, Zoom might lead to a lack of connection. Or they might simply not like the interview process, admittedly a deeply weird experience for everyone involved, where two strangers meet in a hotel room and are forced to immediately talk about, for example, the death of the prettier one’s father.
Even when it works, you never really get to know who a person is – at best you get to know who they want to be. But I’ve noticed recently how very occasionally, even under these oddly pressurised circumstances – perhaps in fact because of them – an interview can reshape itself into something else entirely.
I have become increasingly obsessed by the ways people discover therapeutic interactions outside traditional therapy spaces. Those surprising moments of vulnerability or insight, or sudden, extreme honesty which tend to appear, not with a loved one who knows you, but instead with a stranger or acquaintance, in an unusual room, or at a park, or on a bench waiting for the 38. I’m not in therapy, but on rare occasions those celebrity interviews have felt intensely therapeutic. Partly I think it’s that pressure – a clock is ticking, heightening each moment, and horrifying questions must be asked, and this is the job, and you will never see each other again – but partly it is luck. You connect, somehow, despite their fame and your ordinariness, and something new happens.
There is a man in Japan who rents himself out to do nothing. There exists an industry in Japan in people for rent for uses beyond sex – there are professional guests, for instance, and, allegedly, whole rental families. But Shoji Morimoto’s role is to do nothing – for a small fee he will simply be there. His memoir, Rental Person Who Does Nothing, has just been published, and in it Shoji Morimoto explains, “In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.” His jobs can be simple, such as joining a client for an ice-cream, or accompanying someone when they go to file their divorce papers, or making a fuss of someone’s underappreciated dog. One person, moving cities, wanted him to provide a dramatic farewell from the train platform. He writes, “Things can be different simply because someone [else] is there.” Other jobs are trickier, like joining someone on a visit to their grandparent’s grave, or meeting a patient in the suicide wing of a hospital after an overdose, or a man who wanted to say out loud something he couldn’t tell anyone else – he’d killed someone. Other times Morimoto will get a message saying, “I’d like you to think of me sometime tomorrow or the next day. Just say to yourself, ‘Is she OK?’ or something like that.”
I am cautious of stories that depict Japan as a kind of freaky dystopia, aware that reports about, say, teenage boys who don’t leave their bedrooms or a spreading epidemic of celibacy usually tell us more about Western fantasies and anxieties than Japanese people or culture. But this one spoke to me. A persistent whingey whisper. What did it tell us about work, or capitalism, or relationships? What did it reveal about the role of a therapist, or a friend? What did it tell us about how to be human?
It could be argued, not necessarily by me, but it could be argued, that all relationships are similarly transactional – we deposit attention and withdraw care – and also that the services we pay people for (haircuts, personal training) are not always the things we need from them (someone to listen, someone to tell us we’re doing so, so well sweetie). Maybe that’s me sometimes, when listening to an interviewee – I do nothing, become a mirror, an empty lake. On the way home from school, my daughter prefaces all juicy stories about her day by making me promise I’ll say absolutely nothing when she’s finished.
While loneliness is definitely the soundtrack to many of the rental person stories, and what makes it feel so universal, I think there’s something even deeper and more complicated going on, relevant even to those in good marriages or with loving friends. The need for a stranger, someone who does nothing, shows how complicated all relationships can be, must be, because two separate people have two separate minds, priorities, divergences, fantasies, boredom thresholds, and on and on. Sometimes we don’t need a friend, we just want a witness. If a lover worries about you, as you stand graveside with flowers, you can feel the weight of it. If you tell a friend a secret, you will hear their brain chewing on it., seasoning it with context and history. I can understand the need, and see the clean beauty of asking a stranger to step in and simply be human beside you. What a treat! What a balm.
The problem with becoming aware of these unexpected therapeutic situations is that now I seek them out, meaning they stubbornly refuse to appear. I am walking through life as though meaning might be found at the next tube stop, or on the next job, or when I’m standing with my apples in the Tesco queue. Until such a gift falls once more into my lap, I have to make do with using my friends.
I can see the clean beauty of asking a stranger to step in and simply be human beside you