She found out her therapist had been retired for two years.

This is a story about a woman who found out her therapist retired two years ago — and what happened to the weekly Tuesday sessions she’d been attending all along.

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, two hours before the appointment.

The subject line read: “Returning to private life — a note from Dr. M.”

The woman who received it — I will call her Helen, because she has asked me to, and because she is the kind of person who chooses her own pseudonym — 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. It was three paragraphs long. It thanked Helen for two years of trust. It explained that Dr. M had, in fact, retired from her practice in early 2024, and that all of her active clients had been transferred at that time to a colleague, with whom Helen had been speaking weekly ever since.

Helen, in her car, in the parking lot, with the dumplings thawing, read the note three times.

She had not been speaking weekly with a colleague.

She had been speaking weekly with Dr. M. For two years. By video. Every Tuesday. At 6 p.m.

Or, more accurately: she thought she had been.

The therapist who wasn’t there

Helen is fifty-three. She is a tenured professor of comparative literature at a small private university. She has been in therapy, off and on, since her early thirties. She has, by her own account, “a fairly low tolerance for nonsense,” which is the kind of self-description that turns out, in retrospect, to be very funny.

Dr. M — whose actual name I have agreed not to use, and who has been entirely cooperative with this story, and who I will say up front is not the villain of any of this — had been Helen’s therapist for four years before retiring. The first two years, in 2022 and 2023, were ordinary. They met in person, in a small office above a bookstore, on a quiet street in St. Paul. Helen liked the bookstore. She liked Dr. M. The sessions were, she would later tell me, “as therapy goes, useful.”

In January 2024, Dr. M retired. She did so cleanly. She sent every active client a letter, in the mail, explaining the transition. She introduced them, by name, to the colleague who would take over their care — a woman in her early forties, with similar training and a similar approach, named Dr. K.

Helen, by her own admission, did not read the letter carefully. She had been in the middle of grading final exams. She had skimmed it, registered “transition,” registered “Dr. K,” and assumed that her standing 6 p.m. Tuesday slot would simply continue with someone new.

The first session of 2024 was on Zoom. Helen logged in at 6 p.m. The face on the screen said, “Hi, Helen. It’s good to see you.”

The face on the screen was Dr. M’s.

I will tell you what Helen has told me, which is that she remembers being mildly confused for approximately three seconds, and then deciding, in the way people sometimes decide things without thinking about them, that perhaps Dr. M had unretired, or perhaps the transition was happening more gradually than the letter had suggested, or perhaps she had misread the letter entirely. None of these things were true. But she did not check. She did not ask. She said, “It’s good to see you too,” and the session began.

Two years passed.

The colleague who was actually there

Dr. K — the actual therapist, the one who had actually inherited Helen’s slot — had been on the other end of those Zoom calls for two years.

Dr. K is not Dr. M. They do not look alike. Dr. K is forty-three. She is Black. She wears her hair short. She has a small tattoo on the inside of her left wrist that says, in cursive script, the word “still.”

Dr. M is sixty-eight. She is white. She has shoulder-length gray hair. She wears reading glasses that she frequently misplaces and then finds on top of her head.

I want to be very clear: Helen knew what Dr. M looked like. Helen had sat across from Dr. M, in a small office above a bookstore, every Tuesday for two years.

What Helen saw on Zoom, for two years following Dr. M’s retirement, was Dr. M.

This is the part of the story that nobody — not Helen, not Dr. K, not the technical support team at the telehealth platform, not the three friends Helen has since told, not the new therapist Helen has now started seeing — can fully explain.

The most charitable interpretation, and the one Helen has settled on, is that her brain, for reasons of habit, expectation, and the slightly degraded resolution of Zoom video, simply filled in what it expected to see. She had seen Dr. M’s face in that 6 p.m. Tuesday slot for two years. So her brain kept seeing it. Even when it wasn’t there.

I do not know if this is what happened. I am not a neuroscientist. I will tell you only that Helen — a tenured professor of comparative literature, a woman with what she has called “a fairly low tolerance for nonsense” — believes that this is what happened.

The sessions were, in some ways, helpful

This is the part Helen finds hardest to talk about.

The sessions, over those two years, were good. Dr. K — whose voice Helen heard, whose questions Helen answered, whose homework Helen completed — was, by any reasonable measure, a skilled therapist. Helen made progress on several long-standing issues. She 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, on her end, believing she was speaking to a sixty-eight-year-old white woman with shoulder-length gray hair and reading glasses she frequently misplaced.

The therapy worked.

Helen has told me, more than once, that she does not know what to do with this. She does not know if she should feel grateful — for the help she received — or violated, by a confusion she did not consent to, or simply foolish. She has told me she has tried each of these feelings, in turn, like a person trying on coats in a dressing room, and that none of them have quite fit.

What Dr. K knew

Dr. K, when I spoke with her, was kind, careful, and unwilling to say much. She told me that she had, in fact, raised the question of identity with Helen during their first session — that Helen had seemed mildly confused, but had recovered quickly, and had referred to her by name throughout. (Dr. K’s name. Not Dr. M’s.) Dr. K had taken this as confirmation that the transition was understood.

She had not, she said, considered the possibility that Helen was seeing someone else’s face.

She had wondered, occasionally, why Helen sometimes referred to “the bookstore” — a reference Dr. K did not understand, because Dr. K had never worked above a bookstore. She had let it pass. She had taken it for a metaphor.

It was not a metaphor.

The aftermath

Helen has, in the eight weeks since the email arrived, done several things.

She has started seeing a new therapist — a man, in his fifties, in person, who she has chosen specifically because he does not resemble Dr. M, Dr. K, or anyone she has ever met. She has, with her new therapist, begun the slow work of trying to understand what the last two years actually were.

She has written a letter to Dr. K, thanking her for her work. The letter is three paragraphs long. It is, Helen says, “the most awkward thing I have ever written.”

She has not written to Dr. M, who is, as far as anyone knows, enjoying a quiet retirement in northern Wisconsin and is largely unaware that any of this has happened.

She has stopped using Zoom for anything other than work.

She has, at the suggestion of a friend, considered whether the entire experience says something larger — about loneliness, about the malleability of perception, about the ways in which the people we trust are, in some sense, always partly invented by us.

She has decided that it probably does.

She has not yet decided what.

—

Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, in the course of reporting this story, looked very carefully at the next several faces she encountered on Zoom. So far, all of them appear to be the people they are supposed to be. So far.