I am not okay
Hi there. It’s been a while.
I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been “busy” or “stressed” or some other common complaint but the reality is that I am an undisciplined asshole and missing a single day immediately turned into missing three months of days with, really, no outside interference.
It’s one of the things I am trying to fix about myself. Like many other things — quitting smoking (a thing I have actually done!), losing weight (a thing I keep trying to do!), writing a book (don’t ask) — I expect it will take quite a while to stick.
Here’s the thing: I may not have been “busy” or “stressed” before, but I am now.
In point of fact, I think I am very much Not Okay.
I am not okay. And I would like to talk to you about that.
**
At the end of August of 2001, I broke up with my boyfriend, went out for an amazing dinner at Luigi’s in Jackson Heights (I had the veal marsala with asparagus and probably ten thousand scotch-rocks-es) with Beatrice, and turned 25. Eleven days later, two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center.
At the time, I was a fairly popular “online journalist” and my proximity to the disaster made me substantially more popular overnight, an experience that was weird and unsettling. I won awards for my writing in the immediate aftermath of that horrible day. I also kind of destroyed my own life in the immediate aftermath of that day, although that is a very involved story for another time.
It’s more than 18 years later and I still haven’t fully coped with what I saw and heard and felt that day.
I worked in an office in Queens, right next to the 59th Street Bridge. I lived in Queens, right off Roosevelt Avenue and 82nd Street. I rode the 7 train to work. I watched the second plane hit the South Tower from the train, a memory I managed to entirely repress for something like 12 years.
On September 13, I left work early and rode the subway into Manhattan. I sent a birthday card to my father. I got interviewed by BBC2. And I stepped into a Duane Reade and heard music for the first time in two days.
The Jackson Five: I’ll Be There.
Everyone in the store sang along.
**
The thing about September 11 was that it happened and then it was over. It was a horrible, ungodly tragedy, but it was also over. The danger had passed; the recovery could begin.
These days, I live in rural Texas but I watch news of New York City out of the corner of my eye. I can’t quite look at it directly. It is already worse than the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. I can’t watch. And it is not even close to being over.
I am finding myself doing many of the same things I did in the days after September 11: I am jumpy — unfortunate since I have a neighbor who is coping by doing round-the-clock target practice in his backyard. (How much ammo does he have stockpiled that he’s so confident wasting so much of it now?) I am very emotional — I yelled at Len over money, and I do mean yelled, the other night; there was an article in the paper about how Barack Obama had returned to social media and the sheer relief of a grown-up telling us the truth and also trying to comfort us made me cry. But even while I’m hyper-emotional, I’m finding myself cutting off my own feelings and deliberately distracting myself. I did this after September 11 too.
If I let myself really cry, I think, I may never stop.
**
I spent hours tonight trying to force a good cry out of myself. My neck and shoulders nearly always ache — probably most postural, partially from sleeping in weird positions, partially just from being middle aged. But lately it’s an acute kind of pain, like fresh trauma. I’m not stupid. I know that this pandemic is terrifying all on its own and the specific way it is playing out is interacting with whatever existing trauma I have been carrying around for nearly 20 years.
On September 11, 2001, I finally got home from work around 9:00 at night. I chatted online with a friend I no longer speak to (longer story and largely irrelevant, though I certainly hope she’s okay). A car backfired on my street and I thought at first it was gunshots and I panicked in a way I have never panicked before or since. And then I threw “Armageddon” into the DVD player and fell asleep crying, because that whole daddy-daughter dynamic of the ending always gets me going.
For months I couldn’t cry about what was actually happening. I could cry at sad movies, I could cry at sad songs. I could get angry — I threatened to punch a woman I worked with when she was being racist. But I couldn’t face the reality of what had happened to my city. I couldn’t handle it. I distracted myself and let all my emotions bleed out everywhere else instead.
I feel this happening to me again now. I am scared and I don’t know what to do. And I can’t seem to have a good cry about it without distracting myself to pace around my house or watch seven hours of Tiger King on Netflix.
“To grasp the enormity of it is almost too much for the heart to bear.”
