Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  What is it about horses that people connect with in a primal and emotional way and find to be healing?

  I think that’s an interesting question, in part because one of the things I connect to with horses is a kind of mysteriousness, that which cannot be easily explained, a feeling that travels through the corridors of the spirit, like light. (Notice how I still try to explain it anyway! Ha!) But truly, those moments when I am alone with my horse, looking up into his eyes, are the moments when there is no past, no future; there is only now. And I think that’s a very healing thing, to be liberated, in our overstimulated and overstressed lives, from everything but the present moment—even if just briefly.

  Of course, horses are often symbols of freedom, and who doesn’t have that innate desire to be free? To watch a horse galloping across an expanse of land, its mane and tail flying, is arguably one of the most arrestingly beautiful, graceful, and powerful things we can behold, and I think it serves as reminder of what we can all be if we let ourselves.

  But there are other things that resonate between horses and humans. As prey animals, horses have a very active flight response, which is why you often hear people talking about a horse “spooking.” Humans are wired to have this same response, albeit less frequently—unless, of course, you’re having panic attacks. This was a bond I never expected to have with horses, and helping Claret through his fear helped me through my own. Our communication formed a transformative feedback loop: every time I patted Claret’s neck and calmed him through a scary situation, I was also calming a part of myself; every time I was strong for him, that strength took root inside me, as did my empathy for him, and my love.

  It’s always amazing to me that horses let us get on their backs at all. Such generous animals, horses carry us, and that feeling alone is incredibly healing.

  You write of moments of hope during terrible circumstances. How did you manage to maintain hope during such challenging times? Do you think that having hope is something inborn?

  It must be inborn, because it’s just something I’ve always naturally done, even in what seemed like the most hopeless circumstances. Finding hope—little glimmers in even the darkest days—has been an incredible blessing throughout my life, and has no doubt saved me countless times. But it’s difficult for me to talk about hope without also talking about gratitude because they strike me as kin to each other. When I was nine and accidentally ran through a plate-glass door, I learned a life-changing lesson about gratitude: earlier that day I’d been grumpily lamenting a painful paper cut on my finger, and that evening, as I lay on a hospital gurney with four deep lacerations in my body, I remember looking at my finger and thinking, I wish all I had was this paper cut. That was a huge moment for me because I saw how things could always be worse. “You’re lucky the glass didn’t cut your eyes,” they told me, “or your throat,” and just as I thought the paper cut was bad, only to see that it was nothing compared to the injuries I sustained from the glass, I also knew that those injuries were nothing compared to those I could have sustained. So during even the most terrible times, I found a way to be grateful for what I still had left, and from that place of gratitude, I was able to rally enough strength to keep hoping for something better. It seemed that as long as I could wake to a new day, anything was possible. So I lived for possibility, and in that way, hope became the engine that propelled me forward.

  At one point you went on a quest for a new mother, seeking out a number of women you admired, but eventually came to the realization that you didn’t need a mother. What was that revelation like? How did it feel to come to that realization?

  This revelation was one of the most liberating revelations of my life. I had spent so many years coveting mothers—my friends’ mothers, TV mothers, catalogue mothers, women who played Spades with me or snuck me sips of their sodas when nobody was looking during those long days I was institutionalized, and total strangers—and I coveted them gluttonously. I would ask my friends all manner of detailed questions about their mothers and about how it felt to have that singular kind of love, but I think it’s hard to answer questions about things you’ve always known, such as what it’s like to breathe or to have sight, for instance. So I paraded my fantasy mom around in my imagination, playing out all the ways my life would have been better for having her. And then what I always came back to was my actual life, the one in which I was, for all intents and purposes, motherless. So I spent a lot of energy—and hope, which in this case didn’t necessarily serve me very well—on an exercise of futility. I don’t know why I thought some woman in the produce aisle would adopt me, but there I was, searching for her. This search was put into high gear, of course, during the months I was having panic attacks, when I often felt like a helpless child. How interesting it was, then, to find that the therapist I’d most hoped would be like a mother was the one who, in treating me as if I were helpless, made me realize that my own self-perceived helplessness was merely an illusion, and I had no use for it anymore. I was holding onto a child’s wish in my wish for a mother, and it was time to let it go. Whatever I’d wanted from a mother, I would do my best to give to myself. Realizing this was a huge relief, and it was also another empowering step on my journey through panic.

  You say that your relationship with panic enabled you to fully submerge yourself in the freedom and joy of riding, that only by holding on so tightly you could begin to learn to let go. Can you talk more about this seeming contradiction?

  At the heart of panic is the desire to stay safe, from everything. But the problem is that no true guarantee of safety exists in life. There is, however, a guarantee that we will suffer and we will die. Once I understood this fully—once I accepted that even if I never left my couch again, I still wouldn’t be safe, I would still age, my body would still deteriorate as bodies do—I knew that letting fear stop me from living my life was already a kind of death. So I began to release my white-knuckled grip on everything just enough to start making each minute count as much as possible. And that brings me back to what I was talking about earlier: that feeling with horses of being fully engaged in the Now. I think many people go through life quietly afraid of things, avoiding things that maybe secretly they desire, passions that will never see the light of day, and sometimes this avoidance is so quiet, so beneath the radar, that people never have to grapple with it. But because of the extreme nature of panic, I was forced to look at everything I was afraid of, and in doing so—in realizing that the fear itself was more damaging than any other thing—I was able to slowly let those fears go. I think this idea is similar to the idea of progressive muscle relaxation, which funnily enough, didn’t work for me when I was panicking. But the idea is that by holding on as tightly as you can, there comes a point where there is no choice but to let go.

  This isn’t to say that I don’t still get afraid. I do, all the time, most often when I’m riding. But that’s part of the beauty of riding: it’s this lesson about fear happening in motion. Claret will spook, for instance, at a door (there are many doors around our arena), and then my instinct will be to avoid the door. But if I avoid the door, I’m only confirming Claret’s fear, and taking it on as my own. So instead, I ask Claret to go back to the door, and I think how good the air feels moving over us, and I think that we are strong, that the door is just a door, and then we’re moving past it, into the next present moment, and the next.

  Do you still think of yourself as a runaway? Is it an intrinsic part of your character, a primary thing that defines you?

  Occasionally, on a particular kind of summer night, when the air is slow and fragrant, when the stillness feels like a curtain at the edge of excitement, I find myself almost reflexively gearing up to run. And then I think, Oh, wait, I’m already here. But I think I will always be a runaway at heart. That doesn’t mean that I’m skittish or that I don’t commit fully to things; in fact, I value my commitments—to the people and animals I love, to my writing, to my students, to trut
h and balance and justice—perhaps more than any other thing. But the first time I ran away, even though the police brought me back three hours later, I learned something powerful and rare: I had the ability to change the seemingly unchangeable, simply by leaving. This knowledge played a significant role during my journey through panic; when something didn’t work, I just moved onto the next thing, still believing in possibility, still driven by imagination, still full of hope—the same hope that comforted and inspired me, and gave me courage, as a child.

  When you were young there were a lot of transient people in your life, not only your parents, but friends and people who were kind to you or helped for a period of time. How did you deal with the impermanence of those relationships? Did you ever reconnect with or want to find any of the people from your days as a runaway?

  This is a sad question for me, because there are people I’ve wanted to reconnect with but have been unable find. One of these people was Miss Peggy, a woman who worked in one of the many institutions I was in—the adolescent unit of a state-run psychiatric hospital. For several days after I arrived, the ward was overbooked, so I had to sleep in a cot in the hallway. And on my first night there, this beautiful woman strutted in—voluptuous and surefooted and regal—and slipped a Hershey bar under my blanket. Instantly, I became her puppy, and every night I spent in that hallway, I waited for her to come in for her shift, when I’d gaze up at her with equal measures of gratitude and hunger before secretly filling my mouth with chocolate.

  Miss Peggy became my faithful (and undefeated) Spades partner, and my friend. She always referred to me as “Elizabeth Taylor-Face,” because of my eyes, she explained, and in return, I never took my eyes off her when she was around. And ever since then, I’ve wanted to thank her, not only for her love, but for that initial kindness, when she reached out to a strange young girl wearing too much eyeliner and sleeping in a hallway, and gave her something sweet. It’s kindnesses like this that I will treasure for the rest of my life. So, ironically, these impermanent relationships are the ones that have formed some of the most indelible memories I have.

  At low points in your life as a runaway you talk about going into happy memories of your childhood—memories of your sister or your best friend, Dawn. Can you talk about the role of memory and its importance during dark and harsh times?

  I remember reading a few years ago about a brain study that found that the neurons that fire during a memory of an event are many of the same neurons that fired initially, during the original event itself; therefore, remembering can be a lot like reliving. But we don’t need scientists to tell us this because we experience it all the time, in the stories we find ourselves retelling again and again, in that old bottle of perfume we sniff when want to be immediately launched back to, say, 1989, or in those memories that sometimes seem to arise suddenly out of the ethers with shocking clarity and vitality. So it doesn’t surprise me that during my darkest moments on the run, I turned to memories of light. In those moments, when I gave myself over to the haven of my happier memories, I got to relive them; I got to be happy.

  At one point you realize that your unspoken pact with Larry will not hold, that he must understand your past in order to know you. Were you able to have that conversation with him? Were you able to speak openly about your young life with him? How has he received this book?

  I can’t say we’ve spent much time speaking about my younger years, but Larry has read this book, which is probably the best way I could have told him about that time in my life. The first thing he said as he was reading it was, “Wow, this is very accurate. You’ve really captured me.” And that was probably the best thing he could have told me, because when you’re writing about real people there’s always a danger that they remember things differently from how you do. So I was relieved to know that he felt I portrayed him accurately.

  When Larry finished reading this book, he got choked up by what he called “the mathematical beauty of the three storylines converging into one,” and also by his observation that I had helped Claret in a way that nobody had helped me when I was panicking. I explained to him that I had helped myself, and that, really, nobody else could have done it for me.

  Who are the writers you read most, or you most often turn to for inspiration?

  Oh, so many! And it changes depending on what’s going on in my life. One constant, though, is poetry. Mary Oliver is perhaps my most oft-visited oasis. Her poems always captivate my heart and my imagination, and remind me of what feels most essential. Rilke is another poet I often turn to, and Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires has recently taken up residence at my bedside. I can’t stop reading Albert Goldbarth’s poem, “To Be Read in 500 Years” or Stephen Dobyns poem, “How to Like It”; and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse, is one of my favorite books in the world and is usually within arms’ reach.

  Other writers I keep coming back to are (in no particular order or genre) Denis Johnson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Albert Camus, William Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, William Faulkner, Katherine Dunn, and Jess Walter.

  I also love children’s books and am kind of obsessed at the moment with The Little Prince, which I only recently discovered and which I will probably read at least once a year for the rest of my life. And I am forever in love with Geroge Saunders’s The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.

  What are you working on now?

  I’m working on two things actually: a second memoir and a novel, and I’m excited about both! I can’t say much more than that right now, except that the memoir is, in part, about love.

  How is Claret doing? Is he still at Jane’s barn?

  I’m grateful to say that Claret is thriving happily. I ride him about three days a week, and he makes sure I deposit the requisite amount of carrots, jellybeans, and other snacks into his mouth each time. He loves to play in the paddocks with the other horses, and he’s still as mischievous as ever, still sweet, still a wild thing. And we’re still with Jane, who is endlessly supportive and patient, and who has earned Claret’s (and my) deepest trust and respect.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RITA ZOEY CHIN

  was born into a world that roared: a Queens apartment near Kennedy Airport, where planes were a constant storm. But a move to Maryland four years later introduced her to quiet and creeks and the sounds of cows in the distance, and when she saw horses for the first time, she discovered the most primal source of her wonder embodied in their movement across the field. An award-winning poet, Rita holds an MFA from the University of Maryland. She now lives in the Boston area, where she teaches memoir classes for Grub Street, mentors troubled teenage girls, and rides her mischievous horse.

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  Copyright © 2014 by Rita Zoey Chin

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2014

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  “The Testing Tree.” Copyright © 1968 by S
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