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shadowkat[Before I start this post, two links that moved me today, one about gay rights and one about 9/11, the first was ganked by the wonderful and brave, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rozk and the other by the lovely embers_log:
http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/09/sky-is-falling.html
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=105095}
I deliberately did not post about 9/11 this year. And was not until now planning on posting about it. For a lot of reasons, mostly, because I wanted to put it firmly behind me and focus on positive things. The Comedy Central Link to John Stewart's speech about 9/11 the night it happened, has inspired me to write what follows.]
I'm not going to tell you what happened on 9/11, instead I'm going to tell you about the day after 9/11. 9/12. Today. So many people tell you about 9/11, but I haven't seen many talk about what happened after that. I wonder why? Often it is what happens next, after the event, that defines us and changes us, not the event itself.
September 12, 2001 - The day after 9/11. The day when the sky over my apartment stopped raining dust and debris, which luckily was mostly paper. I don't remember what the weather was like that day, which is odd, since I do remember what it was like the two days before. What I remember is getting up at 7 am that morning and going to the train, like any other day. We'd been told that if we stayed home it would be without pay. Or we could take a vacation day, but I did not want to sit home and think anymore. Or watch the TV - which only showed footage of the event. So, I got up and went to work. Like any other day.
My brother who lived in Chelsea, NYC at the time with his girlfriend, had absconded to the wilds of PA the night before, like a lot of people had - fleeing the city for the countryside. But I had not. This was not an act of courage on my part, it was an act of necessity. I had no where else to go.
I took the same train to work that morning that I'd taken home the night before, well not the same, exactly. The F train. It took me through the tunnel we'd spent an hour in, then through downtown Manhattan to West Fourth Street, where I changed to the D for 161st and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. It was slow but not quite as harrowing as the previous ride and I had a seat for most of it. Then the fifteen minute walk up the hill to work. People were...how to explain it, quiet. And extra-careful. I didn't cry. I hadn't cried. Not a whit. Or a drop. I don't know if this was because I was still in shock from the events of the previous day. At lunch, out on the deck, we chatted about it. Calm, without much emotion. One guy, I remember, told me how this was a line in the sand - a historical marker. Life before 9/11 and Life after.
I think I nodded. Numb. The weekend before, I'd been reading the paper - the Arts section, enthused, planning on getting Peter Gabriel Tickets at the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept 11, but I'd slept too late, and drug myself to work instead, thinking I'd just get them on the way home. I'd been happy. I remember that. Hopeful. I had an interview set up with Barnes and Noble towards the end of the week - which was located downtown - about five to six blocks from the Trade Center. Needless to say, they'd called me that day to postpone possibly indefinitely. [I did have the interview eventually, but at that point, it was clear that they were looking in other directions. Whether 9/11 affected that or not, I will never know. ]
I felt like I was sleep-walking through the day, getting little done. My mind could not seem to focus on things. And the train ride home which normally took one hour or an hour and fifteen minutes, took two hours and fifteen minutes. I think I must have stood waiting for the train at West Fourth for nearly an hour. And when it finally came, it was packed. Again people were quiet. Reserved. Careful.
I remember turning on the TV, only to turn it off again. The news kept repeating the footage.
Over and over and over again.
The next day felt much the same, and the next. I grabbed papers thinking to keep them, but I was barely able to read them or look at the pictures, without wincing, so I threw them out. The guy down the block put up the front page with the twin towers burning in his store front window, along with a list of those that had been killed. I remember during those first few months, shuddering every time I passed it, unable to look at it. Then one day, finally I could look at it. Now? It still hangs in his window, but you can barely see the print or the picture, it is so faded and withered with age.
I still had not spoken to my parents. They were in Greece at the time, on a cruise, and out of contact. The people in Greece had told them about the attacks, stating:"Excuse me? Are you American? Oh, so sorry, so sorry. The Towers. So sorry." Which confused my parents. So they hunted down a news source and discovered NYC had been attacked - which scared them - since both their kids happened to reside there. They'd gotten through to my brother on 9/11, who told them that I was fine, and there was no need to try to get hold of me. Instead, I spoke with my Granny. And kept checking the skyline outside my bedroom window - where I was once able to see the Towers, now just the fading blur of smoke. On my block - the dust was about an inch thick. It was brown soot and it covered everything, cars, rooftops, window panes. While it was pleasant that week, sort of like the weather now actually - mid-sixities, I remember closing my windows tight. The ladies in the book club, I'd been a member of at that time, told me the following week that the sky that day had turned pitch black over our neighborhood, you couldn't see a thing. Then it fell. I know, I walked through the remains on the way home that day, the papers and the ash, coloring the sky a dirty mud brown.
By Friday of that first week, I still had not cried. I had felt rage. But no nightmares. No tears. I jumped whenever a plane flew by the window, which happened often, or heard one in the sky. And I discussed the oddness of that day with neighbors and friends, many of whom had cried. We made jokes about how everyone knew or had a friend of a cousin in the Towers. Then when I got home that night, after yet another long train ride, not as bad as the last three days - instead of almost three hours, it took maybe one and a half, I finally got hold of my parents. And then for no particular reason that I can remember, I cried. And once I started...I could not stop. Oh, I could stop, but only to start up again, often at the drop of a hat and at the most inopportune moments. I also began to have panic attacks on the subway. I felt as if I was suffocating. I could not breath. I came close to fainting once or twice and several people helped me. Anything regarding 9/11 - made me wince or cry, so I avoided it. I did not want to see pictures. I tore the cover off of TV Guide. I refused to go visit Ground Zero until about two months later, when a friend had visited the city and wanted to tour the site out of curiousity. I remember being relieved that we could not get very close.
That Saturday, the weekend following the attacks, Wales and I made our weekly pilgrimmage to the Promenade, which overlooked Manhattan. A place I used to go all the time to relax and stare at the towers. I saw them as beacons of hope. Beautiful man-made structures that seemed impossible. Framed by the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a skyline that seemed almost surreal in its magesty. They weren't there of course. The towers. Last night I looked out my window and saw the homage to them - the twin streaks of blue in the air and I remembered how I felt back then, trying to figure out/remember where they had been. At least, I remember thinking, the smoke is gone. But so were the towers. We used the guide on the sidewalk or the little memorial boards tied to the wrought iron rails of the promenade.
Along the edges of the promenade were candles and flowers and children's paintings. There were little shrines everywhere, dotting the edges of the promenade, with pictures of the dead, plastic flowers, melted candles - the wax decorating the sidewalk in a rainbow of colors, and tokens of affection, much like there had been outside Princess Diana's house or JFK, JR's, but these were oddly more touching. It was hard to look at them without your eyes misting. We said little while we were there. Silently grieving the view that we had once taken for granted, yet had fallen in love with. Then we turned our eyes southward and looked at the Statue of Liberty and northward to look at the Brooklyn Bridge, which still stood proud against the fading sunlight, undamaged. The Bridge more than Lady Liberty struck me - for it had carried millions of pedestrians on that awful day, when the subways shut down for three hours and traffic drew to an abrupt halt, people hoofed it.
Watching TV was difficult back then. My attention would drift. I read a Janet Evanoich novel that made me laugh and comforted me - to such an extent, that I sent a fanmail to her site thanking her for it. Silly in retrospect. Never recieved a response, thankfully. Then struggled reading anything else. I also remember cancelling my trip to Thailand that I'd planned two months before for the week of March 9th, the week of my birthday - my dream had been to spend my birthday beneath a waterfall. It no longer seemed like a good idea. And I scanned the internet, for something, anything to take my mind off that day, off terrorists, off my work situation. Off the feeling of hopeless despair that had settled over me like a thick greasy fog.
Then... one day, I hit upon the TV show Buffy, which I was sort of into at the time, but no more so than any other show or any of the tv shows that I currently watch now. I taped it on occassion, but I seldom re-watched the episodes. I would not have called myself a "fan". I'd hunted websites for it way back in 1998/1999 but mostly out of boredom. This particular episode was the second part of a two-parter episode - the premiere. Towards the very end of the second half of the Season Six Premiere, a young woman stood alone on a trembling tower constructed by crazy people, looking down at a world that seemed to burn her eyes. A world that had gone insane. Behind her stood, unacknowledged, stood her sister, small, and frail. She turns to her sister and asks: "Is this hell??" And I remember thinking...not thoughts so much as pictures. Hard to put into words. I had taped it. And I kept rewinding to that one scene.
The next episode - everyone around the young woman, her friends, family, kept asking what's wrong with her, why isn't she better, why can't she be her old self again. She even fights a ghost...that tells her that it belongs there more than she does, that she is worthless. Wrong. Towards the end of that episode, she tells a guy who has been mooning over her, that the world she is in now feels hard and bright and cruel. I found myself doing the same thing, rewinding. Episode after episode, I watched, transfixed, until finally, there was one that was a musical. Nothing new there - I'd seen musical episodes of tv shows before. But this one was different - at the beginning of the episode, the woman goes out to do her job which is a thankless one, hunting vampires, and sings - "Going Through the Motions...and how nothing seems to matter anymore, it all feels empty and meaningless..." Then latter she sings how she is walking through fire, but can't feel it. Numb. And I rewind, and rewind. Crying as I hear the words. Then I find myself hunting, desperately hunting...for someone, anyone to talk to about the show - not 9/11, I do not want to talk about it, I wanted to talk about that scene, about.... Someone other than the shrink they'd found for me at the time - who I basically went to and cried for an hour. Who had never seen the show and sat and watched me, through bored and tired eyes, pinched at the brow, in a permanent frown.
At work, I kept up a firm poker face. I went to a bridal shower and a wedding. Smiled. Laughed. Made jokes. I went to a birthday party for a gal I'd met the year before in Turkey, and had traveled with to Oregon. At that party, I found a fellow "Buffy" fan, but we didn't quite click - he got tired of me emailing him and sent me to spoiler site, who also got tired of my emails and sent me to a fan discussion board, that was a bit too chatty and also not really interested in discussing what I wrote so much as squeeing in glee that I'd written something other than a post about spoilers, hot characters, or who the main character should ride off into the sunset with...that is until I wrote an essay about a girl named Dawn, the lead character's sister and that motivated someone to post my essay on another fan board, a more intellectual one....and finally, as my friend Boringuen said at the time - I found a way to process the pain. I found a group of people who had to a degree seen the same things I had and desperately needed to talk about it to someone. As Boringuen said - "it's sort of like group therapy but free". Certainly was more productive than the shrink.
The only reason I bring it up is I think it is interesting how we process pain and traumatic events. My work colleague and former boss dealt with the aftermath of 9/11 by constructing a shrine and collecting every piece of memorabilia she could find. She has pictures, pins, a diamond and gold minuature version, a book, a framed photo of Bush and the Guilani shaking hands in front of a flag at Ground Zero, and several picture books on the topic. I remember seeing them the moment I entered her office for the job interview. I also remember thinking, oh, that is how she handled it. Her take was to focus on it. To deal with the literal pain of it. And to never forget and never forgive. We are going to kill those bastards wherever they may lie. It is how many Americans that I've met have dealt with the pain. By seeking vengeance. Voting for someone who they believe will make the enemy pay. But what if the enemy is almost invisible? And difficult to touch? Who pays? It wasn't like a country attacked us. Sure on the news, they showed Iraq, perhaps unwisely in hindsight, celebrating the attack. But Iraq had not attacked the US. A bunch of maniacs had.
My take was the opposite. I grieved the world I'd known and fought hard for. Raged at the unseen enemy. And myself for doing so. Then fought my rage, which had frightened me that first night with its intensity. It was painful fighting that rage, which had funny way of turning on me when I wasn't busy raging outward. It would have been easier to give in, sometimes I think. So, I sought refuge in the loosely interpreted metaphorical goodness of a fantasy television show about a young twenty-something woman who killed demons, mostly her own. I also retreated into my writing. The essays I wrote on the series, some more than twenty pages, and posted to assorted boards during those three years between 2002 and 2004 - were in some ways more about what was happening inside me at the time and how I was processing the world around me than they were about the tv series I was watching. I wrote in metaphors, a hidden code, that I only I knew the answers to and occassionally others on that board appeared to magically decode. When that happened, I felt hope and was able, with their help, and those around me outside of that board, to claw my way out of the despair, hatred, and bitterness that threatened to devour me.
I learned a lot during those years, because it is true what they say, pain often teaches us more about ourselves than pleasure, although I've come to believe that the two are intertwined. Mostly I learned that there are no constants or absolutes. No blacks and whites. As a colleague told me this week at work - we are all here temporarily, everything we touch, own, love or see is temporary, on loan to us. Change is the only absolute and the only constant. It is the only truth. Everything else fluctuates.
My life changed seven years ago. Not all at once. It doesn't happen like that. In snatchs. I was challenged - much like the girl in that at times silly tv show, standing on the top of her waving tower, built by crazy people, looking down at a world bathed in fire, wondering if she should jump and end it all, rest forever in peace, or take her little sister's hand and climb down those steps and face her own hell, day by day, making mistakes along the way, but also learning from them, until eventually she climbed out, leaving that hell a smoldering crater behind her..not completely forgotten, but..not her prison either.
The day after a tragic event in my opinion is often more important than the day of. What choices you make. I remember a discussion I had with a cab driver sometime around 2006, after the coastal Blackout, the big Transit Strike, and 9/11, and he asked how long I'd lived in NY and where I was from originally. They can always tell by your accent that you aren't native. I told him. He paused. Then said, forget it, you're a New Yorker now. You chose to stay. You went to work the next day. You didn't leave. You weathered the storms. That's a New Yorker. We're tough. We endure. We don't give in.
I think it is human nature. It's like that quote - what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger?
I was thinking about it today, what I went through, as hard as it was, was not more than I could bear, although it felt like it at the time, and it did make me stronger, more compassionate and a better person. I am now able to understand things, I didn't before. I know what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is like - I suffered its effects for two years. Flinching at things. Jumping. Feeling numb. And I had a relatively minor version of it. I also know what it is like to feel despair, so badly, that you want to crawl into the fetal position beneath your desk and just sleep. Forever. I didn't know those feelings before 2001. I thought I did. And I know, what it is like to survive them, to push past them, to finally come out on the other side, and realize, yes I can do this, it is going to be okay. I'm not afraid any more. I can and do feel hope.
rozk and the other by the lovely embers_log:http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/09/sky-is-falling.html
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=105095}
I deliberately did not post about 9/11 this year. And was not until now planning on posting about it. For a lot of reasons, mostly, because I wanted to put it firmly behind me and focus on positive things. The Comedy Central Link to John Stewart's speech about 9/11 the night it happened, has inspired me to write what follows.]
I'm not going to tell you what happened on 9/11, instead I'm going to tell you about the day after 9/11. 9/12. Today. So many people tell you about 9/11, but I haven't seen many talk about what happened after that. I wonder why? Often it is what happens next, after the event, that defines us and changes us, not the event itself.
September 12, 2001 - The day after 9/11. The day when the sky over my apartment stopped raining dust and debris, which luckily was mostly paper. I don't remember what the weather was like that day, which is odd, since I do remember what it was like the two days before. What I remember is getting up at 7 am that morning and going to the train, like any other day. We'd been told that if we stayed home it would be without pay. Or we could take a vacation day, but I did not want to sit home and think anymore. Or watch the TV - which only showed footage of the event. So, I got up and went to work. Like any other day.
My brother who lived in Chelsea, NYC at the time with his girlfriend, had absconded to the wilds of PA the night before, like a lot of people had - fleeing the city for the countryside. But I had not. This was not an act of courage on my part, it was an act of necessity. I had no where else to go.
I took the same train to work that morning that I'd taken home the night before, well not the same, exactly. The F train. It took me through the tunnel we'd spent an hour in, then through downtown Manhattan to West Fourth Street, where I changed to the D for 161st and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. It was slow but not quite as harrowing as the previous ride and I had a seat for most of it. Then the fifteen minute walk up the hill to work. People were...how to explain it, quiet. And extra-careful. I didn't cry. I hadn't cried. Not a whit. Or a drop. I don't know if this was because I was still in shock from the events of the previous day. At lunch, out on the deck, we chatted about it. Calm, without much emotion. One guy, I remember, told me how this was a line in the sand - a historical marker. Life before 9/11 and Life after.
I think I nodded. Numb. The weekend before, I'd been reading the paper - the Arts section, enthused, planning on getting Peter Gabriel Tickets at the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept 11, but I'd slept too late, and drug myself to work instead, thinking I'd just get them on the way home. I'd been happy. I remember that. Hopeful. I had an interview set up with Barnes and Noble towards the end of the week - which was located downtown - about five to six blocks from the Trade Center. Needless to say, they'd called me that day to postpone possibly indefinitely. [I did have the interview eventually, but at that point, it was clear that they were looking in other directions. Whether 9/11 affected that or not, I will never know. ]
I felt like I was sleep-walking through the day, getting little done. My mind could not seem to focus on things. And the train ride home which normally took one hour or an hour and fifteen minutes, took two hours and fifteen minutes. I think I must have stood waiting for the train at West Fourth for nearly an hour. And when it finally came, it was packed. Again people were quiet. Reserved. Careful.
I remember turning on the TV, only to turn it off again. The news kept repeating the footage.
Over and over and over again.
The next day felt much the same, and the next. I grabbed papers thinking to keep them, but I was barely able to read them or look at the pictures, without wincing, so I threw them out. The guy down the block put up the front page with the twin towers burning in his store front window, along with a list of those that had been killed. I remember during those first few months, shuddering every time I passed it, unable to look at it. Then one day, finally I could look at it. Now? It still hangs in his window, but you can barely see the print or the picture, it is so faded and withered with age.
I still had not spoken to my parents. They were in Greece at the time, on a cruise, and out of contact. The people in Greece had told them about the attacks, stating:"Excuse me? Are you American? Oh, so sorry, so sorry. The Towers. So sorry." Which confused my parents. So they hunted down a news source and discovered NYC had been attacked - which scared them - since both their kids happened to reside there. They'd gotten through to my brother on 9/11, who told them that I was fine, and there was no need to try to get hold of me. Instead, I spoke with my Granny. And kept checking the skyline outside my bedroom window - where I was once able to see the Towers, now just the fading blur of smoke. On my block - the dust was about an inch thick. It was brown soot and it covered everything, cars, rooftops, window panes. While it was pleasant that week, sort of like the weather now actually - mid-sixities, I remember closing my windows tight. The ladies in the book club, I'd been a member of at that time, told me the following week that the sky that day had turned pitch black over our neighborhood, you couldn't see a thing. Then it fell. I know, I walked through the remains on the way home that day, the papers and the ash, coloring the sky a dirty mud brown.
By Friday of that first week, I still had not cried. I had felt rage. But no nightmares. No tears. I jumped whenever a plane flew by the window, which happened often, or heard one in the sky. And I discussed the oddness of that day with neighbors and friends, many of whom had cried. We made jokes about how everyone knew or had a friend of a cousin in the Towers. Then when I got home that night, after yet another long train ride, not as bad as the last three days - instead of almost three hours, it took maybe one and a half, I finally got hold of my parents. And then for no particular reason that I can remember, I cried. And once I started...I could not stop. Oh, I could stop, but only to start up again, often at the drop of a hat and at the most inopportune moments. I also began to have panic attacks on the subway. I felt as if I was suffocating. I could not breath. I came close to fainting once or twice and several people helped me. Anything regarding 9/11 - made me wince or cry, so I avoided it. I did not want to see pictures. I tore the cover off of TV Guide. I refused to go visit Ground Zero until about two months later, when a friend had visited the city and wanted to tour the site out of curiousity. I remember being relieved that we could not get very close.
That Saturday, the weekend following the attacks, Wales and I made our weekly pilgrimmage to the Promenade, which overlooked Manhattan. A place I used to go all the time to relax and stare at the towers. I saw them as beacons of hope. Beautiful man-made structures that seemed impossible. Framed by the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a skyline that seemed almost surreal in its magesty. They weren't there of course. The towers. Last night I looked out my window and saw the homage to them - the twin streaks of blue in the air and I remembered how I felt back then, trying to figure out/remember where they had been. At least, I remember thinking, the smoke is gone. But so were the towers. We used the guide on the sidewalk or the little memorial boards tied to the wrought iron rails of the promenade.
Along the edges of the promenade were candles and flowers and children's paintings. There were little shrines everywhere, dotting the edges of the promenade, with pictures of the dead, plastic flowers, melted candles - the wax decorating the sidewalk in a rainbow of colors, and tokens of affection, much like there had been outside Princess Diana's house or JFK, JR's, but these were oddly more touching. It was hard to look at them without your eyes misting. We said little while we were there. Silently grieving the view that we had once taken for granted, yet had fallen in love with. Then we turned our eyes southward and looked at the Statue of Liberty and northward to look at the Brooklyn Bridge, which still stood proud against the fading sunlight, undamaged. The Bridge more than Lady Liberty struck me - for it had carried millions of pedestrians on that awful day, when the subways shut down for three hours and traffic drew to an abrupt halt, people hoofed it.
Watching TV was difficult back then. My attention would drift. I read a Janet Evanoich novel that made me laugh and comforted me - to such an extent, that I sent a fanmail to her site thanking her for it. Silly in retrospect. Never recieved a response, thankfully. Then struggled reading anything else. I also remember cancelling my trip to Thailand that I'd planned two months before for the week of March 9th, the week of my birthday - my dream had been to spend my birthday beneath a waterfall. It no longer seemed like a good idea. And I scanned the internet, for something, anything to take my mind off that day, off terrorists, off my work situation. Off the feeling of hopeless despair that had settled over me like a thick greasy fog.
Then... one day, I hit upon the TV show Buffy, which I was sort of into at the time, but no more so than any other show or any of the tv shows that I currently watch now. I taped it on occassion, but I seldom re-watched the episodes. I would not have called myself a "fan". I'd hunted websites for it way back in 1998/1999 but mostly out of boredom. This particular episode was the second part of a two-parter episode - the premiere. Towards the very end of the second half of the Season Six Premiere, a young woman stood alone on a trembling tower constructed by crazy people, looking down at a world that seemed to burn her eyes. A world that had gone insane. Behind her stood, unacknowledged, stood her sister, small, and frail. She turns to her sister and asks: "Is this hell??" And I remember thinking...not thoughts so much as pictures. Hard to put into words. I had taped it. And I kept rewinding to that one scene.
The next episode - everyone around the young woman, her friends, family, kept asking what's wrong with her, why isn't she better, why can't she be her old self again. She even fights a ghost...that tells her that it belongs there more than she does, that she is worthless. Wrong. Towards the end of that episode, she tells a guy who has been mooning over her, that the world she is in now feels hard and bright and cruel. I found myself doing the same thing, rewinding. Episode after episode, I watched, transfixed, until finally, there was one that was a musical. Nothing new there - I'd seen musical episodes of tv shows before. But this one was different - at the beginning of the episode, the woman goes out to do her job which is a thankless one, hunting vampires, and sings - "Going Through the Motions...and how nothing seems to matter anymore, it all feels empty and meaningless..." Then latter she sings how she is walking through fire, but can't feel it. Numb. And I rewind, and rewind. Crying as I hear the words. Then I find myself hunting, desperately hunting...for someone, anyone to talk to about the show - not 9/11, I do not want to talk about it, I wanted to talk about that scene, about.... Someone other than the shrink they'd found for me at the time - who I basically went to and cried for an hour. Who had never seen the show and sat and watched me, through bored and tired eyes, pinched at the brow, in a permanent frown.
At work, I kept up a firm poker face. I went to a bridal shower and a wedding. Smiled. Laughed. Made jokes. I went to a birthday party for a gal I'd met the year before in Turkey, and had traveled with to Oregon. At that party, I found a fellow "Buffy" fan, but we didn't quite click - he got tired of me emailing him and sent me to spoiler site, who also got tired of my emails and sent me to a fan discussion board, that was a bit too chatty and also not really interested in discussing what I wrote so much as squeeing in glee that I'd written something other than a post about spoilers, hot characters, or who the main character should ride off into the sunset with...that is until I wrote an essay about a girl named Dawn, the lead character's sister and that motivated someone to post my essay on another fan board, a more intellectual one....and finally, as my friend Boringuen said at the time - I found a way to process the pain. I found a group of people who had to a degree seen the same things I had and desperately needed to talk about it to someone. As Boringuen said - "it's sort of like group therapy but free". Certainly was more productive than the shrink.
The only reason I bring it up is I think it is interesting how we process pain and traumatic events. My work colleague and former boss dealt with the aftermath of 9/11 by constructing a shrine and collecting every piece of memorabilia she could find. She has pictures, pins, a diamond and gold minuature version, a book, a framed photo of Bush and the Guilani shaking hands in front of a flag at Ground Zero, and several picture books on the topic. I remember seeing them the moment I entered her office for the job interview. I also remember thinking, oh, that is how she handled it. Her take was to focus on it. To deal with the literal pain of it. And to never forget and never forgive. We are going to kill those bastards wherever they may lie. It is how many Americans that I've met have dealt with the pain. By seeking vengeance. Voting for someone who they believe will make the enemy pay. But what if the enemy is almost invisible? And difficult to touch? Who pays? It wasn't like a country attacked us. Sure on the news, they showed Iraq, perhaps unwisely in hindsight, celebrating the attack. But Iraq had not attacked the US. A bunch of maniacs had.
My take was the opposite. I grieved the world I'd known and fought hard for. Raged at the unseen enemy. And myself for doing so. Then fought my rage, which had frightened me that first night with its intensity. It was painful fighting that rage, which had funny way of turning on me when I wasn't busy raging outward. It would have been easier to give in, sometimes I think. So, I sought refuge in the loosely interpreted metaphorical goodness of a fantasy television show about a young twenty-something woman who killed demons, mostly her own. I also retreated into my writing. The essays I wrote on the series, some more than twenty pages, and posted to assorted boards during those three years between 2002 and 2004 - were in some ways more about what was happening inside me at the time and how I was processing the world around me than they were about the tv series I was watching. I wrote in metaphors, a hidden code, that I only I knew the answers to and occassionally others on that board appeared to magically decode. When that happened, I felt hope and was able, with their help, and those around me outside of that board, to claw my way out of the despair, hatred, and bitterness that threatened to devour me.
I learned a lot during those years, because it is true what they say, pain often teaches us more about ourselves than pleasure, although I've come to believe that the two are intertwined. Mostly I learned that there are no constants or absolutes. No blacks and whites. As a colleague told me this week at work - we are all here temporarily, everything we touch, own, love or see is temporary, on loan to us. Change is the only absolute and the only constant. It is the only truth. Everything else fluctuates.
My life changed seven years ago. Not all at once. It doesn't happen like that. In snatchs. I was challenged - much like the girl in that at times silly tv show, standing on the top of her waving tower, built by crazy people, looking down at a world bathed in fire, wondering if she should jump and end it all, rest forever in peace, or take her little sister's hand and climb down those steps and face her own hell, day by day, making mistakes along the way, but also learning from them, until eventually she climbed out, leaving that hell a smoldering crater behind her..not completely forgotten, but..not her prison either.
The day after a tragic event in my opinion is often more important than the day of. What choices you make. I remember a discussion I had with a cab driver sometime around 2006, after the coastal Blackout, the big Transit Strike, and 9/11, and he asked how long I'd lived in NY and where I was from originally. They can always tell by your accent that you aren't native. I told him. He paused. Then said, forget it, you're a New Yorker now. You chose to stay. You went to work the next day. You didn't leave. You weathered the storms. That's a New Yorker. We're tough. We endure. We don't give in.
I think it is human nature. It's like that quote - what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger?
I was thinking about it today, what I went through, as hard as it was, was not more than I could bear, although it felt like it at the time, and it did make me stronger, more compassionate and a better person. I am now able to understand things, I didn't before. I know what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is like - I suffered its effects for two years. Flinching at things. Jumping. Feeling numb. And I had a relatively minor version of it. I also know what it is like to feel despair, so badly, that you want to crawl into the fetal position beneath your desk and just sleep. Forever. I didn't know those feelings before 2001. I thought I did. And I know, what it is like to survive them, to push past them, to finally come out on the other side, and realize, yes I can do this, it is going to be okay. I'm not afraid any more. I can and do feel hope.
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Date: 2008-09-13 12:30 pm (UTC)::tight hugs::
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Date: 2008-09-13 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-13 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 03:52 am (UTC)Glad you found it as well.
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Date: 2008-09-13 07:29 pm (UTC)I discovered Buffy after/because of 9/11 too... I couldn't bear to watch the news, it was all too painful... like they were carrion picking over the dead, keeping us all at maximum level of pain...
so I started channel surfing during the time I would normally fix and eat dinner, searching for something that would sooth my heart. And that is when I found that TNT was rerunning all of Buffy in order. I had never watched the show, but it was perfect, exactly what I was looking for:
exciting and funny, it would entertain and make me feel stronger, like it was possible to get beyond the pain and live life.
Like you I searched online for people to discuss it with, and I found friends who (like me) never got tired of the topic and could direct me to some good discussions.
You know, it wasn't the first time I felt this way: when I was 18 I was full of energy and hope, I was planning to work for Bobby Kennedy's campaign after I graduated on June 6, 1968.... As you know, Bobby Kennedy died that day. I didn't cry, I stopped reading newspapers, watching any TV at all, and switched my planned major from Political Science to Fine Arts. Basically I just shut it all out for decades.
I am not good at understanding my emotional upheavals, and I'm not sure if I ever learn or grow.
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Date: 2008-09-14 01:18 am (UTC)I struggle a great deal with my emotional upheavals, and perhaps spend far too much time analyzing them. These past two weeks have felt like an emotional roller-coaster ride. And now, I'm watching Recount which alternately makes me laugh, and want to kick things. I'm trying to not let my emotions rule me, but it is hard and painful at times. Been doing a lot of praying, silly as it sounds, for guidance, the ability to think past the emotions and be calm.
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Date: 2008-09-14 02:21 am (UTC)It is hard to stay calm, because I do think it matters, a lot, who wins...
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Date: 2008-09-14 03:50 am (UTC)To go further, would only cause me to say things that I did not mean.
Rage is a funny thing. It's hard to fight in oneself and impossible to deal with in someone else. We all handle it differently.
I'm trying really hard not to see the Republican Party as the enemy. They aren't.
They are just people who have a completely different perspective and different way of handling anxiety and fear. For some it means picking up a gun or declaring war, a show of force - much like Barry Goldwater preached in the 1960s and this election in many ways reminds me of those. Sarah Palin sounds a lot like Barry GoldWater, and John McCain reminds me of him as well. Defense first. No matter what. Let people on the home front fend for themselves. And if you have a house, a well paying job, and no issues except the fear of someone attacking your country or another one - that makes sense. Then there's OBAMA who reminds me a great deal of Bobby Kennedy mixed with Martin Luthor King, who has a running mate that reminds me of George McGovern.
The two sides are contentious almost rancorous. They see each other as the bad guy, the extremist. And its frustrating. I don't know if our country can ever come together as united whole. Bush said he was neither Republican or Democrat in his speech that he was President for all, yet he has been more divisive than most.
It is hard to stay calm. Very hard. And hard not to kick people...who so vehementally disagree.