After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  She listened as I continued, and calmly began once I finished speaking.

  “Let me ask you something. If you moved at the same pace, but inside, you were calm, would it make a difference in the time it took you to get here?”

  Click.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know, I’ve never known any other way. It just happens. It’s not my choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” she said.

  Here we go again.

  “I never have a choice,” I said. “I told that to Dr. A all the time. Everything just happens automatically.”

  “Whether or not you get worked up, everything is going to happen exactly same way. That’s all out of your control.”

  Her tone was matter-of-fact, but had a certain lightness to it.

  “Right now, everything is a reflex, a pattern you’ve been practicing for years,” she said as she unwrapped a Jolly Rancher. “But you can control your reaction, your response to it. It’s going to take practice, but you can.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I mean, I would like that. I would love that. Dr. A said the same thing.”

  “And have you made any progress at all?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure about that?”

  Now that she mentioned it, I didn’t want to kill myself anymore, and come to think of it … no, there was no time for that. There was a bigger issue at hand.

  “My boyfriend, John, broke up with me two nights ago, and I feel like it’s literally the end of the world,” I began to cry.” My life is over.”

  “Is it really over?” she asked.

  I sighed.

  “Well, I’m sitting here, so technically, no, but you know what I mean.”

  “I think that’s more of a feeling, or, maybe, more of a fear. Why does one person get so much power? Why does it feel like your life depends on someone else?”

  “I don’t know!” I wailed. “He said I was always crying, that I was always panicking, and always getting drunk and causing problems. I never wanted to do any of those things, but it always just happened. It’s so intense, all I do is worry and freak out, worry and freak out.”

  “So, you’re not going to love this, but is it possible that you were pushing him away without even realizing it?”

  “Why the hell would I do that?” I asked.

  “Maybe you’ve done it with other people too. So they can’t hurt or abandon you first.”

  I just stared down at my fingers, picking off my nail polish.

  “The fear of abandonment, the need to control everything and everyone around you, isn’t working. It’s going to keep you stuck. You need to challenge these conclusions you’re jumping to.”

  Suddenly, she interrupted herself, saying, “Stop picking at your nails. Sit on your hands.”

  I sat on my hands.

  “Let me explain to you what’s been going on. You want to be in control of every situation so it feels safe, and when things don’t go according to plan, the anxiety kicks up, and it’s difficult for friends or boyfriends to handle.”

  The conversation continued, but it wasn’t a standard introductory “tell me everything about your medical history” type session. She didn’t take any notes on me, didn’t write anything down. As we continued talking, she directed a giant spotlight onto the murky mess that I’d made of my mind, of my inner life, right on the invisible little girl that never left, still causing me to react so strongly, to feel so intensely, to cut everyone off and push them away, and manipulate my tone of voice so that it sounded angry, intimidating.

  She knew this invisible girl. She’d worked with her before. She knew how to challenge her. In fact, she knew exactly where that invisible little girl had come from. She even took a guess at her birthday. She told me, in no uncertain terms, why everything had begun, eight years ago, to feel like the end of the world.

  * * *

  “If we get ourselves angry, we are altering that part of ourselves. Good will is the only intrinsically valuable thing,” said Emmanuel Kant.

  I started taking an interesting philosophy class that correlated with Dr. J’s session. It was an “ethics” class, but it focused more on philosophy, the pursuit of happiness, the way people’s minds worked.

  I learned that Epicurus observed that anxiety is not inevitable; it is caused by false beliefs.

  I learned that Seneca distinguished between what things are up to us and what things aren’t, and tried to locate the point at which things are inside of our control.

  His structure of our mental lives looked a lot like what I learned with Dr. J.

  What is fact and what is judgment or opinion or emotion?

  Essentially, said my professor, “Shit happens, how equipped are you to deal with it?”

  When Dr. J and I sat down to figure out just what I was so anxious about every week, we continued the groundwork Dr. A laid of trying to figure out what was rooted in reality and what was based on fear of what might happen, combined with some sort of mind-reading and script-writing I was projecting onto other people and situations. While some anxiety kept me safe, as it does for everyone, much of it was noise that needed to be turned down, then eliminated entirely.

  “When you allow yourself to be seized by ‘what if,’ you stay stuck, running and freezing and never going anywhere,” she said.

  We practiced letting my emotions come—letting the news make me scared, feeling rejected by a classmate—and then redirecting my attention. First, I was supposed to acknowledge it without running from it, and then I was supposed to … do nothing.

  “If you call it out, it will lose its power. Build your capacity to feel it.”

  There were things we tried and failed, like pushing a difficult situation out of my mind for a while. “On the shelf, I can think about it later,” I was supposed to say.

  That usually didn’t work very well, until, one day, it did.

  That was the beginning of learning to control the intrusive thoughts; because there was a difference between choosing not to think about something and “suppressing” it. I could acknowledge that I saw it and decide to deal with it when I felt more ready, if it was important, rather than obsessively worry about it during the middle of class.

  Dr. J gave me her email address and her cell number and told me that I could text her or call her if there was an emergency, and that she responded to email within twenty-four hours. This was the kind of support I had needed all along, when things came up in real-world time.

  It was exhausting, a lot of hard work, and a lot of uncomfortable “acting opposite” of how I felt or wanted to act, which wasn’t always successful.

  This work, though, was an essential part of facing fears I had been avoiding, and uncurling my fingers around things I didn’t want to let go.

  * * *

  I was especially surprised at Dr. J’s reaction to Anthony.

  I had met Anthony while on a date with someone else, and while we made zero sense on paper, we made sense to each other, at that exact moment in our lives. A long, on and off, three-year moment.

  “He’s eighteen years older than me,” I told her. “He doesn’t have money or anything. In fact, he’s not doing so great right now. His business was hit hard after 9/11 and again with the recession last year, and now he’s waiting for his divorce to be finalized,” I explained.

  “Do you like spending time with him?” she asked.

  “Yes, but people will look at us, and they’ll think I’m a gold digger, or that I’m weird,” I said.

  “Who cares what people think?” she said.

  “Yeah, I wish,” I huffed.

  “No, really. So what? What are those people going to do? Why does the opinion of strangers, which you actually don’t know, but are speculating, matter?”

  I was pretty surprised at this. I was expecting her, like my mother or any other adult in my life, to discourage me from what was an “iffy” idea at best.

  She e
mpowered me to make a choice and to own it, and I spent a few uncomfortable months vetting the stares of people until one day, I didn’t notice them at all. Something had finally sunk in: what other people thought didn’t matter. I had always thought it was an excuse, or a defense, “not caring what other people thought.” I felt like people used it as an excuse to behave poorly, as a justification for bad behavior or a bad attitude. If you aren’t hurting anyone, it’s okay not to care.

  The glaring difference in our age was most apparent when I took him to see a student Cabaret showcase at the New School and two girls did an interpretive dance that involved crawling around on the floor on their backs, and he made a face that made me laugh so hard I had to go to the bathroom to stifle it. Or, maybe it was most apparent when he first came around to meet my parents, and then, for the holidays, and we all kind of skirted around the uncomfortable notion that he was closer to my mom’s age than mine.

  He owned a flower business uptown, I worked part-time at a school—and went to school.

  He had gray hair, and mine was almost jet-black.

  Still feeling like an outsider at school, I straightened that hair every single day, not letting my curls show. I’d stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of my apartment every morning, my hands shaking with impatience at nothing in particular, my head buzzing with the twenty-four hours of neurotic commentary I still couldn’t turn off. I would walk into a classroom and know that everyone was thinking about me, and that the thoughts they were forming were bad ones. I still felt I had to be one step ahead of things, making accusations of Anthony or predictions about how a night would play out, trying to figure out all the possible threats to my relationships and academic career that weren’t actually threats at all until I turned them into big fat problems.

  Simple things, like taking a taxi home from his house to mine without his accompanying me, felt terrifying. Like a child, I needed him to come with me to make sure I was safe. For a twenty-year-old, this sounds ridiculous, but you have to remember that on the inside, I was still a scared twelve-year-old in so many ways. Another difference, one that didn’t matter was much, was that Anthony could drink legally, and I still couldn’t. He had moved back into his parent’s apartment, but they were rarely there, and usually at their second home in Tom’s River, and I started to sneak sips of alcohol from his parents’ liquor cabinet, then shout into the other room to make sure he had a plan to pick up weed from his cousin.

  Then, I drank too much and fell off a bar stool in front of his friends.

  I drank too much and fell off my chair at French Roast on the Upper West Side in the middle of dinner and thought it was hilarious.

  I drank too much and threw a shot glass at his head when he was trying to tell his cousin to stop talking over my emotional karaoke rendition of Jewel’s Foolish Games at a local Thai restaurant.

  Something about that relationship with Anthony triggered me emotionally in a way that, when I was high or drunk, brought out the terrified fifteen-year-old who screamed, cried, and threw things. I was so freaked out by my own feelings that I just couldn’t sit still with them—I had to fight them, or fight someone, something.

  John never fought back. He had just given up, when I got like this. But Anthony did fight back.

  So I called and texted Dr. J, determined, and freaking out, until I heard back. I left her a voicemail, on one occasion, that was just screaming. No words, just screaming, so she couldn’t tell if I had left her the voicemail by accident, or if I wanted her to hear what was going on.

  My crises were now almost entirely of the interpersonal nature, so when, on one occasion, I called her, and she texted me that she “needed fifteen minutes” because she was in her friend’s jewelry store, and took longer than fifteen minutes, I called again and again.

  Then I texted, and I called, and I texted, determined and desperate. I was no longer suicidal, no longer facing actual life or death circumstances, but feeling that I was.

  “Do you need to get that?” The woman in the jewelry store had asked her.

  “No, she’ll be okay,” Dr. J said, knowing that I would be.

  She was starting to try and get me to make it through these moments on my own, but at the same time, she was challenging me to move through what felt impossible-to-handle triggers. I started turning to alcohol and weed to try and make it all stop, and they just fueled the invisible little girl even worse.

  “You can’t be mindful when you’re high or drunk,” Dr. J observed, one day, noting that when “crises” happened, I wasn’t sober.

  Her words went in one ear and out the other, since the invisible girl protected herself by plugging them up, singing, la la la la la.

  I only saw Dr. J once a week, and she couldn’t always answer my texts. I needed something of an urban Sherpa to help carry my luggage for me. So, I would drink and smoke away the epiphanies we came to, taking two steps forward, one big drunk stumble back.

  I didn’t want to admit I was unhappy, but I expected things from people that would never happen, and I expected the world and everything else in it to change to make things feel better for me.

  And it didn’t.

  Which is how I ended up calling Dr. J from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway one night not knowing where I was, because I had been drinking and got in a car with some guy and literally had no clue where I was or how to get home.

  I was drinking through a relationship that felt wrong, then drinking and cheating, then drinking so much that I landed in the emergency room across the street.

  Meanwhile, I took an internship with a local paper, the Downtown Express, and I always prayed that on reporting and office days, the migraines would stay away.

  They were still excruciating and unpredictable; I would get stuck in traffic in a car for hours on a three-hour trip to see distant family, or it would hit in the middle of work, or while I was at Anthony’s parent’s house in New Jersey. The most devastating aspect was not being able to predict when they would happen, and being trapped wherever I was, praying that the preventative medication, the acupuncture, the physical therapy, the Axert, would work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.

  But nothing was going to stop me from covering a story. I loved covering stories, and I was so thrilled at the chance to have an actual byline that I happily covered an ice rink opening up in Battery Park, a parade in Hudson River Park, some Little League games.

  I was content to tackle those small potatoes, until, one day, my editor sent me down to Vin’s old high school.

  “There’s a teacher getting an award, and he’s legally blind and only has one arm,” he said.

  It was November when I headed down there in the middle of the Yankees’ victory parade, so it was chaos—they had just won the World Series—and wrote a story called, “Blindness Is No Handicap to Great Teaching.”

  Homer Panteloglou would pace the room to make sure nobody was on their phones, since he couldn’t see to the back.

  “His handicap makes him unique because he’s the type of person who will always find a way,” said one of his students. “Even though it might be difficult for him sometimes, he’ll find a way to make things work.”

  However, she does notice some difficulties because of his vision.

  “We see him having to hold the paper really close to his face,” she said. “It probably takes him twice as long to read and grade papers than it would any other teacher.”

  She added that the students are so comfortable with him that he’s more of a father figure to them than a teacher. “They all go to him for advice, even the seniors.”

  Kim Caceres, 17, said that she will miss him when she goes to college next year, and while the two will still keep in touch, she said it won’t be the same as having him around all the time. “If you have any sort of problem or a question, you go to him. He’s wonderful.”

  “The kids and I have a rapport that’s unique, like they want me to be their parent type of unique,” said Panteloglo
u. “A lot of the kids come from homes where they don’t have that stable family environment, so at school I try to help out a little bit.”

  While he has no idea how many other teachers with physical or vision impairments are currently working in the New York City public school system, Panteloglou has heard about teachers who are blind and bring seeing eye dogs into the classroom. The Dept. of Education has 50 teachers with visual impairments on record in the New York City public school system, though a spokesperson said there could be other people out there who haven’t registered for visual assistance.

  Panteloglou said that some “cute” stuff happens from time to time, especially due to his color blindness. “I was talking to the kids one day, and I was looking at the fish hanging off the [classroom] ceiling, and I said, ‘It would be cool if I painted my walls blue, so I can feel like I’m in the middle of an ocean.’ A kid raised his hand and said, ‘The room is blue.’ I had no idea. It was blue for years and I didn’t even know it.”

  My editor, who wasn’t exactly predisposed to liking me, for whatever reason, loved the story.

  And in that story, I found my calling.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Today I will stay with you.

  I will be right here, right now.

  I will fight my desire to retreat to our yesterday’s

  Where I can still find us.

  I will resist the pull of practicality

  That keeps me worried about our tomorrows.

  Please keep looking for me. I never left.

  Today I will stay with you.

  I will be right here, right now.

  —Mara Botonis, When Caring Takes Courage

  The days of 2010 came and went, days where I could barely muster a deep breath. I was always saying the wrong thing and pissing people off. Potentially innocent black type on a page, emails and texts from friends, teachers, my boss, the director at my internship—they were all ripe for distortion and misinterpretation due to their inherent lack of actual tone, and I cast a net of paranoia and fear over all of these interactions.