If you’ve spent any time around children in the past decade or so, you’re sure to have come across the great Mo Willems, who has written such classics as A Big Guy Took My Ball!, The Duckling Gets a Cookie?!, and Should I Share My Ice Cream? I wish he would write for adults. We could enjoy such titles as My Boobs Have Started Sagging!, My Doctor Just Ordered a Colonoscopy?!, or My Therapist Is Moving Away!

I love my therapist. I’m not afraid to admit it. She is wonderful in every way. I’ve been in therapy off and on since I realized that my mother was an alcoholic and my father was in denial and these facts had left me very confused about the truths that I saw and the ones the people I loved most refused to accept. So for most of my adult life, in other words. I found my current therapist just before my first novel was published, and all the good in my life was giving me hives. Like magic, she was simultaneously putting out a shingle that reflected her belief that it is sometimes the most wonderful occurrences in life that challenge us the most. Since then, she has never let me avoid the sort of truths that are so much easier to sidestep than acknowledge, and she makes the most sympathetic faces when doing so. It’s sort of infuriating and 110% amazing.

And now she’s moving away. In a characteristically annoying and super-evolved fashion, she has decided that she’s had enough of the busy, achievement-oriented Bay Area and psychology’s hyper-focus on the Ego and she’s actually going to do something about it. She’s leaving her practice and the area to walk the walk, as it were, letting her newly powerful spiritual beliefs guide her toward a more peaceful life. This is a woman who earned her Ph.D. from Stanford, has a successful practice in a wildly competitive field, and has barely seen forty summers. You love and hate her now too, don’t you?

In all honesty, I’m not the least bit surprised. I would have been surprised, in fact, if she hadn’t eventually done something like this. But I will miss her so. And I realized this morning that one of the things I will miss the most is the ability to really talk with someone who is also committed to developing a deeper emotional conversation, one that reflects the deeper emotional experiences we are all having. I love this country, but we are really, really bad at talking about our feelings. If the American emotional dialect were to have a true linguistic parallel, I think it would fit in somewhere in between Desperate Caveman Grunting and Medieval Warped and Corrupt Castigations. Did you see that clip last night of Ted Cruz confronting a Donald Trump supporter? I practically had dry heaves. My husband had to pick me up from rolling around on the floor and assure me that all communication has not gone to hell in a handbasket, that a man on the street has no hope of really going up against a career politician, so he’s going to resort to fighting dirty. Wait. THAT was supposed to convince me? Excuse me while I go lie in the street for a minute.

In case you’re wondering how I got from emotional vocabulary to politics, let me tell you that they are far more closely intertwined than any of us want to admit. My therapist would never let us get away with such emotional smoke and mirrors, but the reality is that we are reaping the results of our failure to truly communicate, to prioritize experience as much as we prioritize wealth and power – not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because there is simply no way around the fact that we are profoundly emotional organisms, that our experiences and desires and hopes and fears play just as big a role as our jobs and finances and titles and acquisitions, even though we have been pretending, probably since our country was founded, that they do not.

Just look to the language. Science and art and every other channel of deep reflection tell us that the human emotional capacity is as informative and critical to our functioning as our intellects are. Yet we continue to tell each other to “deal,” to “be a man,” or “grow up,” or we tell our kids to stop feeling sorry for themselves, we praise them when they hold back tears, or demonize them when they explode with fear or sexuality or rage. We continue to try to pretend that our deeper emotional selves are not worth the same time and respect we devote to our intellectual and externalized selves. But however we may feel about the fact that emotional experiences play just as great a role in our lives as anything else, they simply do – no matter how hard we try to subvert and deny and ridicule them.

I can’t help but think that the challenges they present would be so much better incorporated if we all took a deep breath and stopped denying them. Stopped seeing them as punishment because we punish ourselves for them, and start seeing them as opportunities for insight and growth and bravery by acknowledging that they’re there and we’re not sure what to do with them. At the very least, couldn’t we try a few new ways of talking about them? And not just behind closed doors with a trained professional, but with those we love and trust already, who might be just as eager to acknowledge our collectively hidden corners as we are? Isn’t that always where the most powerful revolutions begin – with unreasonable hope in the face of tiresome fears?