After 9/11

by Helaina Hovitz

  Ava and I did another fifth step, working through the memories and the resentments that hadn’t quite gotten shaken out of my head during that first round six months earlier

  “You have to act like a woman of grace and dignity to be one, behave as though everyone were watching your every move, even if you think nobody is watching,” Ava said as she smoked cigarettes outside the bedroom window of her apartment, in a neighboring building from Aaron that was part of the same complex.

  I was about to turn twenty-three, so I guess I could be considered a “woman.”

  “Okay, got it. Only do what feels like the right thing. I’m with you,” I said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out on the ledge. “I want pancakes. Bring the book with you.”

  We walked to the diner on the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Ninth Avenue, and I re-opened my notebook.

  “You stayed in a situation that was abusive and unhealthy for a long time because of the fear of leaving,” she offered as she poured syrup over her eggs and bacon at the Moonlight Diner on the corner of Ninth Avenue. “Going forward, you’ll want to make a commitment to yourself not to stay in any relationships that aren’t good for you, even if leaving is painful.”

  At the end of the third day—because this time, it took three damn days to get through it all—she said, “Victims don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. They point to something someone else did to ‘make’ them feel a certain way, which keeps them from having to change anything. I can tell that’s not you. You’ve always had a desire to get better, but you probably couldn’t clearly see how you were keeping yourself from really being able to do that.”

  She told me to go home and do nothing but meditate for an hour. After that, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

  * * *

  Soon, it became time to address the social anxiety, which Ava framed like this.

  “Instead of thinking about what you’ll get from a party, or a dinner, and what people will be thinking about you, why don’t you think about what you can bring to the situation?”

  Once I started thinking about it that way, after clearing out all the self-doubt and paranoia and threat assessments, I was suddenly the first person to crack a dirty joke or break the ice and keep the conversation alive. I hadn’t even known that person was inside of me, but when I focused on other people, I had less time to dwell on whatever I felt was still dark inside of me and what my own expectations were.

  Ava had me make a list of all of the qualities and characteristics I wanted to emulate. I wrote them in a notebook with a really nice, sparkly pen, the kind that makes you want to write in your best handwriting, and I read them to myself every day.

  Modest, confident, compassionate, grateful, tranquil, adult, I trust myself, I stay present with the person I’m with, I trust in a greater plan, I feel supported and protected, loyal, brave, content, self-reliant, self-sufficient, tolerance, stable, self-accepting, equal to other women, accepting of differences, accepting of powerlessness over others behavior, trusting, unassuming.

  “Have faith, that one day, you will become all of those things.”

  As I neared the big one-year mark, on October 17, a few blocks away from our apartment, a man left a truck outside of the Federal Reserve building. It was the corner of the block where I got my nails done. The student, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, believed he was going to detonate a one-thousand-pound truck bomb outside of the building—but the whole thing was a sting operation, so nothing was set off.

  I remember texting Ava, and her response being, “We don’t dwell in fear and self-pity,” which I found very insensitive.

  “I’m not dwelling,” I immediately texted back in defense. “I’m just sharing this with you.”

  “All I can do is pass along to you what was passed along to me,” she replied.

  I grumbled to myself, texting Dr. J, who said, “She, like you, is just human. She doesn’t have all the answers.”

  I was leaning on Ava the way I had always leaned on Vin, Aaron, John, Anthony, and Dr. J, clinging to them to keep from drowning. Now, almost comically, it was like I realized the water had only been two feet deep all along.

  A small part of me, even though I was irritated, and slightly afraid, began to understand that if I kept looking for people to have the reaction I wanted, a specific message of comfort or reassurance, I was going to bring even more grief on myself when that expectation fell through.

  Nobody else is going to make you feel safe.

  So, I stopped thrashing around and grasping at them, and simply stood up.

  Dr. J was answering my texts less and less, and the more silent she was, the more apparent it became that I could get myself through what felt like an “anxiety emergency” on my own.

  * * *

  The time came, exactly one year and one month after I got sober, that I had to break up with Anthony, who I had been faithful to for the past year, and on and off with for two more. I had tried everything to make it work, in sobriety: breaks, compromises, and acceptance. What I wanted—intimacy, emotional vulnerability, a strong connection, the ability to build a life together—was not unhealthy, but we wanted different things.

  At his cousin’s wedding, he looked over at me from the altar where he stood as a groomsman, and must have thought I was losing it. The officiant marrying his cousin and new wife could barely read, had a thick Staten Island accent, and looked like she had just been picked up from the hotel bar. But there I was, sobbing, taking a tissue from Anthony’s sister, because I knew it would never be us up there. I felt tears rolling behind my ears, down my neck, as I tried to wrap my head around the concept of loving someone and still having to walk away from them.

  At the reception, Anthony’s relatives talked about how they hoped it would “be us next,” and I sat at the table with the rest of his family, acting weird and sullen “for no reason.”

  At some point, my phone buzzed in my lap.

  Did you hear what happened at that kindergarten? With the shooter?

  I Googled it and saw “Sandy Hook” and “Kids dead.”

  What’s going to happen to all of those kids?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  This one moment—Now—is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now. I am not the content of my life. I am the Now.

  —Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

  I can’t leave him,” I told Dr. J that Monday. “It’s right before Christmas. This is so cruel.”

  “So you’re going to go through the pain of pretending everything is okay on Christmas and then do it?”

  I sniffled, searching for another reason not to do what felt too painful.

  “He keeps me safe,” I said.

  “How?” she asked.

  Just one simple word took this veil off my eyes. I had no answer. I started a sentence, and stopped, and started again.

  “You kept yourself safe,” she said.

  “You want a healthy, functioning relationship, and you’re being hard on yourself for asking for what you want. But it’s what you should want. You’re not being selfish. You should be talking about moving in together after three years. That’s the reality.”

  I wailed like a baby and threw myself, face down, on the couch.

  “You can’t hide behind a text, either,” she said. “You have to call him.”

  * * *

  I continued to take the freelance assignments I was offered, or that I went out and hunted down. I covered news about how a community rallied to support a toddler with cancer and a theater program that gave at-risk high school kids something meaningful to do. I even began to do restaurant reviews. At charity events, I covered red carpets where headset-clad PR people ushered celebrities along the media line, and I balked at the stupid young “reporters” who would ask celebrities dumb questions about their
marriage or fashion or some food trend, when I wanted to know why the cause mattered to them and what their actual involvement was beyond lending a name to the organization.

  I would get home and tell Grandma about what I was writing, hoping she would understand. The dementia was progressing like we knew it would, her body following suit, slowly caving into itself, hunching over, leaking from different places. Her breathing became more shallow, but she still clung to life, clung to me. There was always a home health aid sitting at the table where we used to sit together, but I quickly learned to be comfortable hugging and kissing Grandma in front of her. Grandma would be wrapped in a blanket, staring not at the TV but ahead of her, somewhere far off, and I would slowly get to eye level with her, and put my arm around her, and touch my forehead to hers, and say, “Hello, love of my life!” and she would smile.

  My mother still bought cards from “Grandma” for my birthday, Christmas, and Easter. She’d hold the pen for my grandma to sign her name with, creating a wobbly scribble next to some X’s and O’s. My mother always wrote, “To Helaina, the love of my life,” which is what Grandma had always called me. Grandma turned ninety-five, then ninety-six, then ninety-seven, and we got her gifts on holidays and birthdays and “just because.” My mom bought her tops, scarves, and perfume to cover up the smell of ointment. I got her costume jewelry with big stones in hopes that she’d be able to see them sparkle, her eyesight lost to something known as macular degeneration. We didn’t know how long she’d be around to use these gifts, or if she was aware that she was wearing them, but that wasn’t the point.

  “I’m so mixed up I don’t know who I am,” she’d say.

  “I feel that way sometimes, too,” I’d say as I nestled my head in her neck. “But you’re the love of my life. That’s always who you were and who you’ll always be.”

  “How did you find me?” she’d ask, no longer recognizing that she was in her own home.

  “I always know where to find you,” I’d assure her. Some days I ran myself ragged trying to fit time in, and my dad would always try to get me to give myself a break.

  “She won’t even remember you were there, honey,” he’d say.

  “Maybe not,” I’d respond over my shoulder, juggling a can of soda, a sandwich, and my purse, kicking the door to the staircase open and dragging my tote behind me on the stairs. “But I will.”

  Sometimes, I’d find her sitting in this big reclining chair in the living room, one that raised her feet up with the touch of a button. I’d sit on its big arm, wrapping myself around her—even when she had a cold, which my mom would get angry about, and I’d look at our reflection in those floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the ones I used to watch myself dance in as a child. Now, they reflected someone small, someone whose body was almost molded to the chair and withering away, fragile as wet paper. But when I looked down, directly into her eyes, I saw the same sweetness and strength that was always there. I would sing, “You are my sunshine,” and she knew, deep down, that it was me. We’d tap on the table with our hands; I’d give her a thousand kisses.

  When she said, “I don’t know where I am,” I would tell her, “You’re home, and you’re with me, and you’re okay. I promise.”

  I’d touch her face, stroke her skin, bring her head onto my shoulder. This was all we had now, not many words, but a familiar feeling of comfort, and my best effort to make her feel that she was safe.

  * * *

  “So, explain to me how exactly you do what you do. Why would someone go to you?”

  Mark Murynec was a “philosophical counselor,” someone who helped people figure out who they were and what made them happy. I met him in the office he rented off of Washington Square Park in the spring of 2013 to interview him for a story for the local newspaper.

  “Well, if you have a headache, you take medication to kill the pain, and if you’re sad, you take medication to feel better. On their own, meds treat the symptoms, while philosophical counseling helps treat the cause. There’s nothing I can do to help a headache, but I can help you be happy despite the headache. Hopefully.”

  He continued to explain that some people see a psychoanalyst for fifteen years and still have the same problem.

  “It just doesn’t work. Psychology isn’t bad, but philosophy can also help.”

  I pondered this and thought back to that Ethics class at the New School that seemed to open new windows of understanding for me. Mark had, in fact, gotten his Master’s in Philosophy from the New School in ’07, the same year I entered undergrad. His career had gotten my attention because I found myself, with over a year of sobriety and several more years of skill-building therapy under my belt, trying to find answers. I had cleared away all of this wreckage, learned how to just show up for life, and I was realizing that I had never gotten the chance to figure out who I was.

  “What’s the biggest difference between you and a conventional psychologist, in terms of your approach?” I asked, turning my attention outward to the list of questions I’d prepared.

  “Psychologists believe that mind equals brain, so they treat mind and brain. But, as philosophers, we believe that humans are composed of mind, body, and soul. To a psychiatrist, your past is what makes you who you are. I’m not going to dig up stuff from your past,” he said.

  “How can you expect people to deal with the present if they don’t also deal with the past?”

  “Your past is an integral part of who you are, so it’s easy to become mired in your history. I start with the basics, let people tell me what they want to tell me. The point is, who you are can change, if you’re open to questioning yourself and everything you know.”

  I looked down at the page where I was furiously writing and could already tell I was going to have a hard time reading my notes back.

  “How do you deal with people who come to you with anxiety?” I asked.

  “We combat anxiety by living in ‘the now,’ right? But what if ‘the now’ sucks? That’s when we have to make a decision to say, ‘I don’t mind being hurt, because at least I’m alive.’”

  “Wow. That’s one way to look at it….” I mused. “You must have studied psychology. Seems like you know it well.”

  He smiled back.

  “I took some in undergrad.”

  “What are the most common questions people come to you with, in the beginning?”

  “Am I doing the right thing; who am I; what do I want; how can I change; can I change; someone else; am I wrong in feeling that way?”

  “I’m sure you get lots of people looking for help in the relationship department,” I said.

  “Sure. Why don’t you tell me about your relationship?”

  I had walked right into the subtle shift between an interview and a session.

  I cleared my throat and began picking at my cuticles.

  “Well, I fell in love with a girl, which is a first.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Grace. She’s a year younger than me, and she’s so sweet, and the sex is amazing. I mean, we can spend ten hours in bed and just go, and go, and it’s so beautiful. I always knew I could be attracted to a girl, and there was this one time a couple years ago … anyway, she’s different than all the guys I dated, or that I think I should date. They usually have a good job, a life plan, or a loving, supportive family. She doesn’t have any of those. I met her in the program, and we had been best friends for almost a year, but something changed since we changed our relationship. Now, I care more about her lack of motivation in her career, her lack of financial security, her tendency to be flirtatious.”

  Being with a woman was a completely different experience. I had gone from someone who was pretty much closed off from intimacy and unavailable emotionally to someone who gave me a real run for my money in that department. We really, really loved each other.

  We cooked together, we spent a lot of time in bed, just being affectionate and listening to music, and sometimes, I read to her from Buddhist philosophy books,
which we’d then discuss thoughtfully.

  “I mean, there are a lot of reasons this won’t work long term, and I can tell I’m sabotaging it. My parents are pretty pissed about it, for one. Second of all, I’m being controlling, I’m acting jealous, and I’m not really enjoying it anymore because I’m worried about what all of the long-term implications of how she’s living her life now will be on me, since I’m so emotionally invested.”

  “Okay, well, what does a good boyfriend or girlfriend do?” he asked.

  I paused. I had no answer. After stopping and starting several times, I realized my only expectation was for them to have a stable job, an apartment, all externals, none of which came from me—these were things my mother would have wanted for me.

  “It sounds like you’re disappointed. But how can someone disappoint you and not meet your expectations if you don’t really know what you want?” he asked. “You’d be surprised how many of us end up wanting what our parents want without realizing it, and without stopping to figure out what our own ideals are. So, what’s important to you? What qualities?”

  “Honesty, definitely. Loyalty, a sense of humor, family values, ambition,” I said.

  “And what makes you happy?” he asked.

  Again, I had nothing.

  “I don’t know….”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Well, writing doesn’t count, I suppose. I’ve always enjoyed that, but it’s a job.”

  “What’s your favorite kind of food?” he asked.

  “Either Mexican or Thai.”

  “Do you like comedy? Who are your favorite comedians?”

  I started to rattle off answers and understood how simple these questions were.

  “Where do you like to go? What do you like to do just for the sake of doing it? Not as a means to an end, but in and of itself? That’s how Aristotle defined happiness.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” he said as he capped his pen, indicating that the session was ending. “The solution isn’t to end a relationship but to love yourself more.”