After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Syd, I learned, lived across the street, and, unlike me, had access to the roof of his building. It went from a fun, casual, weed-smoking, movie-watching, beer-drinking friendship to something more. He became my lifeline.

  We sat up there, at a green plastic table with diamond-shaped holes, and I would cry for hours. I didn’t believe I could choose not having Aaron—abuse I could survive, but being alone, I couldn’t. Sometimes, Syd would leave to get water and find me sitting with my legs dangling over the ledge and have to physically pull me back.

  It’s never going to get better.

  Syd often had to drop what he was doing to keep me from doing “something stupid,” which resulted in his losing a job or two.

  “You told me you were standing on a chair on your terrace,” he’d later tell me. “I couldn’t go back inside after that. I left when I got those calls.”

  I started to hold handfuls of pills in my hands, opening and closing my fist around them, then letting them fall to the bathroom tiles underneath me.

  It’s never going to get better.

  I tossed the orange bottle across the room, cursed myself that for not having the courage. I decided it was time to get help. Real help. Help beyond the Celexa I was now taking for anxiety, beyond the Klonopin that wasn’t quite doing it, beyond the sleeping pills that quieted the hell out of my waking mind for eight hours. There were still sixteen excruciating hours to get through, and I knew I had to give it one more shot, take one last leap of faith, before I took an actual attempt at something drastic that couldn’t be undone.

  I reached out to Dr. C for what I resolved would be one last time, and she gave me a referral to another CBT therapist, saying she thought I should give it another try.

  I sat down to send therapist number eight an email. I wrote that I was at the end of my rope, that I really didn’t know how much longer I was going to last, that I was trying to break up with an abusive boyfriend, and had no friends, and spent most of my time crying and hyperventilating, that, no pressure or anything, but she was my last hope.

  She probably won’t even write back.

  Two hours later, I had a response.

  That sounds like a lot. I think I can help. Come to my office. Here’s a list of my available days and times.

  * * *

  I left class that Wednesday afternoon to hop on the 2 train from Fourteenth Street to Seventy-Second street.

  I hurried off of the train, up the subway stairs, and crossed a very dangerous four-way intersection of conflicting traffic lights and walk signals.

  The avenue was long, with many trees and brownstones. Nothing but homes as far as the eye could see, which was unusual.

  I found the door, so tiny that I missed it the first time, and walked through the very narrow hallway of the first floor. I peered at the writing on each person’s office door, looking for a name. I finally found Dr. A’s room in the back, but her door was closed.

  The time was 4:01.

  I sat on the folding chair outside of it, flipping nervously through a magazine, tossing one page, then the next, violently to the left, not liking to have to wait for even a minute when I rushed to be on time. The restless energy was whipping around inside me like a hailstorm.

  Eventually, she opened the door.

  “Helaina?” she asked as she let someone else slip through and waved goodbye.

  She looked like she was in her late thirties, was about 5'10", wearing her chestnut hair in a short, low ponytail, a beige cardigan over a white tank top, and a large diamond engagement ring with matching wedding band.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  I forced a smile, conflicted on whether or not I should show her that I was annoyed that she had run a few minutes late.

  “Okay,” she smiled, taking a deep breath. “So, I got your email, obviously. But why don’t you catch me up. Tell me a bit more about what’s going on.”

  I told her everything, what the past few years had been like, why I gave up, why I came back, and what my life was like now.

  “I don’t even want to be conscious half the time. Aaron wakes up late on weekends, so I take sleeping pills to go back to sleep until 1:00 p.m. myself. Then I just have to fill up time, and I have nothing to do if I’ve already done schoolwork. The less time I’m awake and thinking, the better.”

  “You told me you feel like you want to die, and I want to make sure I understand,” she said. “Do you actually want to die, or do you want to not feel how you’re feeling now?”

  Click.

  “I don’t actually want to kill myself, but my world is just becoming too small. All I do is count down the time until I can see Aaron again, and he’s horrible. I have nothing in my life except the memories of bad things that keep pushing their way into my brain over and over. I can’t have a good thought without a bad thought smashing into it. I can’t seem to make any friends, either.”

  “Okay. That’s a lot. Let’s back up a second. First, we need to change the way you express how you’re feeling. Instead of telling someone you want to kill yourself, can you take a step back and think about how to communicate how you’re actually feeling? You’re overwhelmed, or you feel so bad you don’t want to be here. You want things to get better. You feel like you’re not being heard.”

  “But at the same time, I do feel like I want to die, because it’s that bad, in that moment.”

  “Understandable, but if you say that, people are going to respond to that and call 911 or take you to the emergency room.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, thinking we had more pressing issues to deal with. “Got it. I’ll try.”

  “How else are you communicating with people? How is your relationship with your dad? Your mom?”

  “They’re ok with my dad, but my mom is quick to fight with me or criticize me, and I defend myself, and then we start fighting.”

  “What happens when you try to remove yourself from the fight?”

  “She keeps carrying on, she’ll push her way into my room, or text me, or email me, or keep talking outside of the door or loud enough for me to hear from the living room.”

  “Can you tell her how you’re feeling when you feel really bad?”

  “She wouldn’t listen, or care, or stop what she was doing or saying or carrying on about,” I said, trying to picture her actually responding to my talking about “how I felt” in the middle of an escalating argument.

  The session continued that way, until Dr. A sat back in her chair and put down her legal pad.

  “Do you know how strong you are?” she asked, catching me off guard.

  “No …” I said with a huff.

  “I know you don’t feel that way. But over the last few years, you’ve been pushed in so many directions by doctors telling you ways they were going to help you, to fix you, and they were wrong. That can be traumatic too. And still, you’re actively asking for help. Something in you is not willing to give up, and by now, I bet you many people probably would have.”

  Click.

  She was actually telling me that what I had been feeling, even if it was bad, was reasonable.

  “You were told, ‘This is the right way to feel better,’ and then, it didn’t work. That would make me feel pretty lost and helpless too. But here you are. It’s not going to be easy, but if you want to do the work. I think we can make things better.”

  We didn’t talk about 9/11 that day, or on any day, at length. She would, years later, tell me that she was worried I wouldn’t be able to revisit it directly without spiraling. She had gotten notes from my psychiatrist, and she was, to the extent she could be caught up, caught up.

  We started with one of my biggest hurdles: the train stopping in the tunnel.

  “Why panic when the train stops? That won’t make the train move.”

  You think I want to panic, lady?

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “It just happens, without my having any say. And then, I’m all riled up when I get to where I’m going.”

>   “What can you do when you start to worry? Refocus your brain,” she said. “Listen for the bass in a song on your iPod. It’s subtle, so you really have to concentrate. Or, you can observe your surroundings, narrate what you’re doing in the moment, and don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  She sent me home with worksheets.

  “When “blank” happens, I feel “blank.” I believe it means “blank.”

  What it “meant” was often something very dramatic, a severe conclusion that, when I matched it against the initial thing that happened, seemed like a long shot, a far cry, a lot of steps ahead. That didn’t mean it stopped happening, but I was starting to recognize it, become aware of it, and that was something.

  When someone doesn’t answer my texts, it makes me feel like a piece of shit. I believe it means that they’re ignoring me, because nobody likes me, because I can never make friends, because I’m fucked up, because people are horrible, and I’m going to be lonely for the rest of my life.

  When I hear a bang outside the window, it makes me feel afraid. I believe it means that there’s another attack happening and I’m not going to find out in time to do anything about it, because we’ll all just be sitting in class, or it will be in the middle of the night, and we’ll all think it’s just outside New York City noises, and we’ll die a long slow death, and my parents will die, and we won’t be able to save Grandma or get her out in time, and the cops will be stopping all the cars from leaving, and we won’t have anywhere to go, and they’ll bomb the bridges while we try to leave.

  When I see one of Vin’s friends around, it makes me feel worried. I believe it means he may be around, and something bad will happen, like that time I was with Aaron and we saw him by the Seaport, but I didn’t have my glasses on and I didn’t know I needed contacts. So while I was actually running into a store to just go into the store, he thought I was running away from him, and he was with Gemma, and he made some comment, and him and Aaron started shouting. Then there was the time that he was outside my building waiting for Gemma, and he came up to me directly, and he pushed his way into the lobby, and I started screaming and crying and didn’t know what to say, and I called Aaron to leave work early to try and call him out and fight him, because I thought that would make it stop, and it didn’t work.

  I usually needed to use the back of the worksheet.

  I went back to the familiar task of charting my level of emotion when I felt triggered—panicked, angry, upset, or anxious—logging the reaction’s intensity on a scale from one to ten in the moment. It was known clinically as the Subjective Units of Distress Scale for emotions, and I usually rated what I was feeling as a ten. Sometimes, I’d draw a thermometer and fill it up to the level I felt. Soon, I realized that I wasn’t always a ten, I just felt overwhelmed and “not empowered” to solve my problems, as Dr. A said.

  In person, she asked me simple questions I’d never thought about before, checking fact to reality, truth to perception, thought to fiction. I’d never known there was a difference between any of them.

  I was supposed to stop and write down:

  What is it I’m really reacting to?

  Is it justified?

  What is the worst that could happen?

  How likely is it?

  “You have to be alert to thoughts that upset you, try to catch them and burst them like bubbles. They’re sabotaging you and you don’t even know it.”

  “Everyone is going to try and hurt me,” I said. “That’s what I have to try to be alert to.”

  “How?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will they succeed?”

  “Yeah, if I’m not constantly thinking about it, if I’m not looking out for it. Look what happened with Vin and Hailey and Gemma. For example, this guy, Q, won’t stop emailing and texting me. I only went out with a couple of times, over a year ago, he knows where I live. He can find me and kill me.”

  “I don’t think anything is going to happen based on whether you think about it or not.”

  “Yes it is, how am I supposed to keep myself safe if I don’t pay attention to what’s dangerous?

  “You’re not going to, because it’s out of your control. You have to let it go.”

  I thought she was nuts, but I took notes on everything she said and took her suggestions. I left the apartment just to go for a walk to the Seaport and back again. I bought satchels of lavender from the Union Square farmer’s market and inhaled them, hoping it would calm me down. I held an ice cube in my hand when I felt like I wanted to hurt myself, or I felt myself getting “out of control.” In doing that, I very quickly began to realize that substituting pain for more pain wasn’t what I wanted after all.

  “Feelings pass, you know. They do,” she tried to explain. “So even if something is bad at the time, you can keep in mind that you will feel better.”

  I tried to tell her that I never moved past it. I fell into darkness and never came out on the other side. I stayed swimming in those murky waters; I thrashed around and nearly drowned in them, desperately trying to avoid it.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot of traumatic things, but there are so many levels here because you keep exposing yourself to situations that aren’t good for you,” she said.

  I ate up all of this new information, but we could only do so much at once, so the digestion was slow.

  Learn new skills, get stuck.

  Skills, stuck.

  I tried to break away from Aaron, saying, “I’m not going to call him or text him today,” and going at that for fairly long stretches at a time. I took my Grandma to dinner at T. J. Byrnes and to the Chinese restaurant across the street. I went to the gym. I tried to talk to strangers sitting outside at the Seaport just to talk to them, figuring out how to start a conversation, how to connect with someone when I felt I literally didn’t have a friend in the world, except for Gina, who was sometimes there on the other end of the phone, but still never seemed to be free to hang out in person.

  When my Grandma’s birthday rolled around, we went to lunch, then to their favorite store, Loehman’s. She was so happy that day, having all of us together. I was closer to being “the little girl” she knew again, and she was slipping further away from being the woman she had been her whole life.

  Two months later, in February 2008, a whole new world was opened up to me. It was wild, glamorous, seductive, destructive, and crazy, a world that loved swallowing up and spitting out vulnerable young girls who just wanted to feel like they were special, like they belonged.

  * * *

  I was walking Gucci when Jordan got in touch with me over Facebook.

  “You have to come to this club. This guy from that show The O.C. is going to be there, because Carissa’s sort of dating him, and it’s the hottest club right now. Meet me in front of Exchange on Twenty-Sixth and Tenth at 11:30 p.m. We’re meeting the promoters there, then going to Suzie Wong.”

  I didn’t know what a “promoter” was, or what a Suzie Wong was, but Jordan emphasized that these were special promoters, not just regular club promoters, as if that was supposed to mean something. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been invited anywhere, though, so it meant enough to me to prompt me to pull a low-cut purple satin top out of my drawer, slip on high heels, straighten my hair, do my makeup, and wait five hours until 11:30 p.m., when I hailed a cab and took it to Twenty-Eighth Street and Tenth Avenue. I had Googled Suzie Wong, and apparently, that was where Page 6 found everyone who was anyone.

  In the cab, I tried to shake off the anxiety that came with my excitement. My mother always told me about her days as a dancing queen, how she and my aunt always went out with their girlfriends on the weekends. Now, I could tell her that I was doing the same. I was going out with the girls, and if it killed me, I was going to like it.

  If I didn’t, that’s what drinks were for. I’d learned that when Aaron started making sure I had something to drink, usually a forty of Coors Light that I forced myself to down even though I
didn’t like the taste, to accompany the weed and amuse myself while he hung out with his friends. Or, he’d fill a glass with Smirnoff Orange Vodka mixed with some sort of fruity Mango Papaya Orange Juice we bought at the store as soon as we got to a party, knowing it would help take the edge off.

  When the cab pulled up, I saw Jordan outside, smoking a cigarette. This isn’t Suzie Wong, I thought. Next to her was an older man smoking an American Spirit cigarette with one hand (the other was tucked in his pocket). He was snapping his gum, eyes darting around, wearing an intense look of concentration at nothing in particular. He looked like an awkward high schooler, constantly moving and spinning around. He wore a hat that said “Rockstar” on it.

  “It’s been a long time,” Jordan said, kissing me on the cheek. I hadn’t seen her in at least eight months, and she had put on weight after graduation (and after, I learned, she initially kicked the cocaine habit). With her freckled nose and slightly puffy cheeks, she wasn’t exactly a vision in the pink strapless satin dress she was wearing, but she had curves, and passed for alluring with enough makeup. For some reason, Jordan never needed to look classically attractive to be popular.

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  It looked more like a lounge than the hottest club in town.

  Jordan laughed almost condescendingly.

  “This is where we’re meeting Kate. It’s her job to get girls like us into the clubs. This is her husband, Rockstar. Well, Richard. But everyone calls him Rockstar.”

  Rockstar looked up from under the brim of his hat and nodded.

  Jordan told me to just bring my college ID for the night, explaining that she’d get me a better one the following week, with my real name and picture on it for $150. I pulled my New School ID out of my wallet and held my breath as the doorman checked it. I tried not to panic as the thoughts swooped in.