Woodland Creature

Not quite a blank canvas

11 Sep

I don’t really feel like I have the right to write about 9/11. I wasn’t there. I didn’t lose — or even almost lose — anyone I knew. I wasn’t even in New York City yet; I was 50 miles away, in my hometown of Wilton, Conn. I don’t want to compare my experience in any way to those who were personally affected by the event, but it profoundly changed my life too, in its own way.

It was the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I remember the morning’s bright blue, end-of-summer sky. I had a free period and stopped by my chemistry classroom with my friends for extra help. The head of the A/V department nearby, the only place in the school that had TVs that were always on, came in to tell us that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. We assumed it was an accident and went about our work.

As the news spread throughout the student body, people became alarmed for their parents and loved ones in the city. Most people’s parents worked in New York, many of them downtown, some at the World Trade Center. Finding that cell phones weren’t working, my classmates began leaving classrooms in tears, lining up at the main office to try calling their parents on a landline. Teachers tried to keep everyone focused on our studies, but soon realized it wasn’t possible. They let us go down to the auditorium to watch the TV news updates on the big screen. I remember seeing footage of Palestinians celebrating and tears rolled down my cheeks. My brain couldn’t comprehend that there were people in the world who wanted to murder people — thousands of people — just because they were Americans, like me.

School administrators realized they wouldn’t be able to finish out the day and called an early dismissal. I went home on the school bus and sat in front of the TV, catatonic, seeing the same images over and over. There were rumors that these unknown terrorists were planning to attack the nearby nuclear power plants next, killing us all with the radiation. Whenever I heard a plane fly low overhead, I would hold my breath until I could hear it moving farther away (and I still do, 10 years later). I hoped that if my family died, we’d all go quickly and painlessly, together.

I lived in a proverbial fog for at least the next week. I would wake up, go to school, come home, sit in front of the TV news, cry and sleep. I felt sick to my stomach all the time — with fear, with grief for those who lost their lives and loved ones. I didn’t feel like eating. My mom knew something was wrong. I had acted this way before, but never for such a long while. She made an appointment for me to see a therapist. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and began taking medicine for it, which changed my mood — and my life — immediately.

I had always been cripplingly shy. I couldn’t chat with strangers or even look them in the eye. I didn’t talk much when I wasn’t around my family or few close friends. My face turned bright red if someone I didn’t know well tried to make conversation with me, or when I raised my hand to speak in class. When I was invited to slumber parties, I’d become sick to my stomach and sometimes I would have to cancel at the last minute. When I was 12, I heard about social anxiety disorder from a TV commercial and I was pretty sure I had it. I talked to my guidance counselor about it but he brushed aside my concerns and said I seemed okay. I was only 12 and I believed him. I didn’t find out until three years later, after 9/11, but I was right.

A few months after the dust downtown had settled, a young woman named Kathleen started working at the middle school where my mom worked. Her former job was in the World Trade Center but she now had a phobia of going any higher than five stories in a building, so she moved to the suburbs and started a job at the 1-story school. Kathleen had anxiety, too, and was nice enough to talk to me about it at Starbucks one afternoon. As we chatted, I saw a hint of red crawl up her neck and I knew she was like me.

After the first Twin Tower was hit, everyone in the second tower, where Kathleen worked, was told to stay at their desks because the situation was under control. Her overactive fight-or-flight instincts told her to disobey orders and she fled the office, making her way down the many flights of stairs. She made it out of the second tower unharmed, but her coworkers weren’t all so lucky. Her anxiety was what saved her from 9/11.

And, oddly enough, 9/11 is what saved me from my anxiety.

  1. woodlandcreature posted this