I was now a married man. Joy and I had moved in together. This was the first day of our new life. No more 9/11 distractions. I was committed to a fresh start and a new career with this company. They’d be my new family, like Network Plus had been.
These fucks. Nobody had even hinted at this. I was with them for the first anniversary of 9/11, just two weeks earlier. Were they planning to fire me then? They wrote a press release using my name: “Look who’s working for us! A hero.” I thought, Wow, thanks. Nice, guys. I sat with them, gave them a bunch of information for the release. “Is it OK with you if we send around this release about you, Mike?” Sure. Sounded like a really nice public gesture of accepting me into their fold. It made me even more confident, eager to come back and begin anew.
So sneaky. So thoughtless. I have to tell this news to my new bride, on our first day back from our honeymoon? They forgot to tell me? So 9:00 a.m., Monday fucking morning, that’s when I find out? Unbelievable. They could’ve told me, “It’s not working.” All they had to do was talk to me like a human being.
I stuffed my shit in a box and walked out. That was it.
This was day one of my new life. This was day one of putting everything behind me and starting again.
I waited for Joy to get home. She was shocked. I assured her it would be OK. I could work for my buddy Mac doing construction. We’d be fine with money. The situation would be temporary.
Anyway, I was fed up with the white-collar, roller-coaster, go-behind-your-back bullshit. You can keep that world. All you had to do was read the newspapers to see that the cascade of corporate scandals was not subsiding—Freddie Mac, Health-South. Every day it was something else, and thousands of poor people lost their shirts. I was having a hard time getting excited about participating in that world.
I still went on interviews for telecom sales jobs, but it was tough for me. Hell, I used to be the one conducting the interviews. Yet I’d throw on my suit, pack a folder full of résumés, and endure the transparent, phony, superficial textbook questions. “Michael, where do you see yourself in five years?” With my wingtips pressing down on your throat. “Would you say that you’re good under pressure?” Gee, I don’t fucking know. Can I tell you a little story about a day called 9/11?
Did they know my story? I don’t know. I had National Public Speaker under the Specials Skills section of my résumé. That piqued no interest. Under Media/Public Appearances I listed The Oprah Winfrey Show, 48 Hours, U.S. Senate Special Committee,” etc. Not once did one person ask me about it. And I felt it was wrong for me to bring it up, to promote myself as some kind of … I don’t even know what.
The job interviews didn’t pan out. But I know now, looking back, I probably wasn’t making the best self-presentation.
I was angry. Everything I saw happening in the world made me crazy. Politics became more and more divisive. Everybody was taking hard lines. Civility was gone, replaced by blame and demonization. Unity had vanished, replaced by ubiquitous protests. Corporate scandals were being revealed left and right. News reports claimed that soldiers were dying because they weren’t supplied with sufficient armor. And why did everyone and anyone seem to have their own reality show?
I watched all of this on TV. I read about it in the newspapers. The shock and confusion that had been my mental state in the year following 9/11 had turned, in the subsequent two years, into impatience, rage, and cynicism. The state of the world became increasingly absurd to me. Nothing was making sense. I lost my temper all the time. I was short with Joy, with family members. I became more and more guarded about my 9/11 experience, which was now totally off-limits.
The phone had pretty much stopped ringing. I was done with the whole tour. And this left me without a purpose and desperate for some meaning. I had no idea where to find it.
Shepard Smith at FOX News called me to be on his show. I said OK. Maybe I’d feel better about things if I did it.
I got set up in the studio, we begin the interview, and all of a sudden he shouts, “WAIT! We have breaking news coming in.” It startled me. They cut to a report of an oil refinery explosion in Oklahoma. There was fire, a lot of it. They had good video. “Is it terrorism?” Shepard glowered menacingly into the camera. He spent the next forty minutes speculating. I sat there silent in a chair across from him. He never got back to me. That was it. I felt foolish. Who am I, sitting here with makeup on my face in a television studio? How is this helping people remember the firemen?
Before and after several commercial breaks, they promoted a special segment airing later that night on Paris Hilton’s sex tape scandal. That’s what people wanted to hear about.
Two more 9/11’s would come and go in 2003 and 2004. Joy and I decided to start our own annual tradition to honor the coinciding anniversaries of 9/11 and our wedding day. We’d go away somewhere, take the day of 9/11 to reflect on 9/11, then celebrate our wedding anniversary. Inevitably, wherever we went on 9/11, we talked about it with people we met, and my story would come out in conversation. We met some truly wonderful people. But I still can’t forget, in those two years, overhearing some unsettling comments from people with whom I shared my story. Comments like, “C’mon, who the hell is this guy?” and “You really think he was there?” and “That’s a big load of bullshit.” Yes, it hurt. But what really got to me was that I could see clearly that most people wanted to be done talking about it. Around that time, a phrase had been coined: “9/11 fatigue.”
Yeah, that darn 9/11 was pretty inconvenient, wasn’t it? We were a couple years removed from it, but that pesky little 9/11 was getting in the way of our having a nice day. It was as if people were complaining, I was planning a spa vacation over lattes with a friend, and somebody mentioned 9/11. What a bummer. Well, I’m sorry to bother you, folks, but you can’t forget 9/11, and you sure as hell don’t piss on it. How often have I heard someone unconsciously clicking the remote control and saying, “Oh, it’s just something else on 9/11.” Don’t say that, and don’t say it like that. You don’t have any idea of the disrespect you’re showing people.
I was appalled that for some the visceral reaction to 9/11 was not “Oh my god, how awful,” but a cold, analytical “Well, you could’ve predicted this. That’s what you get when nations act a certain way.” That’s what they felt. That was their primary response. No sympathy. No empathy. No feelings of loss. No sense of tragedy. Thousands of human beings died. Don’t you get it?
“9/11 fatigue.” How could it come so soon? Fatigued from what? Did you lose somebody? Were you there? Does watching a segment on Paris Hilton, delighting in the polarizing sound bites of CNN’s Crossfire, or reading about the plundering of pension funds relieve your fatigue?
The President implored the nation to “Go shopping!” as a meaningful national response to the attack. Is that what 9/11 did—get in the way of our addictive consumerism? Would spending our paychecks at the Gap really be the best way to fight terrorism and honor our dead?
The world was making absolutely no sense to me.
So what did I do? Did I try to resolve anything in my own head? Did I try to progress? No. I decided to get lost.
It’s easy to get lost working construction. You’re outside. There are no offices, no phones ringing, no e-mail. Just hammers, wood, concrete, jokes, beer, and cash. No shower until after work, maybe, if I wasn’t too tired.
I was quick to rationalize my new lifestyle. I mean, where exactly is the great meaning in the corporate world? People getting so serious with each other over what? Getting a quota met? That’s meaning? This was my fearful and angry mind at work. I could look at any job and say dismissively, “Where is the meaning?” I could make any excuse not to look at the job listings. The truth was I just didn’t want to look at myself. I didn’t want to go to the center of my trauma and work my way back to balance. I didn’t want to find meaning. I didn’t want to rebuild my life. It was easier to tear apart everything and everyone else.
This way of thinking gave me no peace.
Soon it dawned on me that even after a year of speaking about it publicly and almost three years since it all happened, I still had not really found the meaning in or made any sense of my 9/11 experience. And that tormented me. The defiant but confounding aimlessness of my external life was nothing more than a reflection of my unshared and unresolved internal anguish.
Internalized and unspoken—three years later—I still held on to unhealthy, immobilizing emotions: anger toward the perpetrators, guilt for surviving what others did not, trauma from the fear of imminent death when I was under that truck, and a pervasive feeling that it was all so unfair.
It’s three years later. What do I do with this experience? What does it mean?
Some days I would slow it all down. I’m grateful. I’m alive. I’m not injured. My whole office made it. The woman in the wheelchair made it. It all worked out. I was supposed to feel thankful, humble, blessed—and I did feel all that—but at same time I was angry. Yes, I’m alive, but look what it did to me. It brought me to my knees. It made me run for my life. It made me feel as though I was going to die. Then I’d think about the firemen going up the stairs and that knowing look in their eyes. And I’d imagine every family who lost somebody they loved, and then I’d become angry again—angrier than I was before.
So WHAT are YOU doing about it?
Self-loathing kicked in. It crippled me. I got so fed up with everything going on in the world and in my life and in my crazy head that I was blocked from growing as a human being, from becoming a better person. It hit me like a kidney punch: Look at me. I’m not making the most of my second chance at life. And I have no idea how to even do it. Nothing paralyzed me more than that feeling. My survival on 9/11 was all reaction, reaction, reaction. Now, three years later, there was nothing to react to. I just had to live with it, slowly, day by day, hour by hour. How would I move on, move forward?
My wife just wished I would go back to being the person she knew before it all happened. That’s who I truly am, truly was. Because it’s not how I was acting.
And I hated myself for it. I was blowing my second chance. The chance to live that others had died for, that others never got. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, my second chance. The world I saw, the world I once inhabited so easily seemed foreign and difficult to navigate. And that made me feel that I was doing something wrong, or that there was something wrong with me. The pain of sitting secretly mired in my shame became unbearable.
So I woke up every day and got lost. I got lost working construction. I put myself as far out and away from myself and my feelings as I could. But I went out too far. Way too far.
This idea of not facing myself as a way to alleviate my pain only made the pain worse. It had nowhere to go. It festered and metastasized and snowballed to the point where no one really wanted to be around me.
It hurt me to hurt others. So I isolated myself. But here’s the thing about isolation: It’s not just about being alone, by yourself with nobody else there. It’s also about feeling alone in a room full of people, people you know, people you love. And there’s no lonelier feeling than that. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t hide it. My friends, my family, my wife—they all saw it. And they knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to pull out of this by myself. I needed help. But there was no way anybody was going to tell me this, not unless they wanted an earful of harshness.
Joy saw it in my ever-shortening temper. I was negative all the time. She’d ask me what I thought about something—anything— and she’d get glass-half-empty. Fuck this view of things. She saw me look at life with contempt. I’d come home from a job interview—which had become fewer and far between—saying “Screw them anyway” before I knew if I had an offer or not. She kept trying. She’d say, let’s go do something fun. I’d think, Why bother?
My family tried to give me space. They’d ask Joy, “How’s he doing?” All my life they figured I could figure things out and work through them. My mother used to say I always worked best when I was under pressure. But this was a different kind of pressure. This was not a deadline or a game clock running out. This was the pressure of simply being alive and seeing life as a tremendous, negative burden. They wanted to help, but I gave them no openings. My famous line was “I’ll figure it out.” I made it difficult for them to even bring it up. They always knew me to be a strong-minded person, but a strong-minded person with a confident and get-up-and-go attitude. Now I was strong-minded with anger and cynicism. That’s a hard person to talk to.
They urged me to go talk to somebody else, then. Why? I felt that I already knew what happened to me. Sure, I was angry about it, but I didn’t believe I was in any trouble.
“Michael, have you heard about post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD?” They’d read it was common among people who had gone through what I had gone through. Joy would tell our friends that I was depressed. My friends would say, “He’s not the type.” But that’s what it was. I was depressed, extremely depressed. I was a portrait of untreated PTSD, though I denied it up and down.
It didn’t take a therapist to see how defensive I was. And the best defense is a good offense. So what did I do? I complained about Joy. “She just doesn’t understand me, and it’s her not understanding me that makes me act like this even more,” I’d say. “She’s always going against me,” I insisted.
“Look at me. This isn’t full-blown depression.”
“Joy’s no expert. She’s not a clinical psychologist.”
“She’s only thinking about herself—how it all affects her, not how it all affects me.”
“Why was she adding fuel to fire?” I’d say.
“Just have faith in me that I’ll correct myself,” I’d say to her, “rather than telling me that I’m fucked up, telling me to see somebody. I’m sick of this. How about standing by your fucking man?!”
You say anything and create any argument to avoid examining your own emotional, psychic pain.
One particularly strong argument I would fool myself with was to say that I didn’t want to talk about it with Joy and my family because it would upset them too much. They knew what happened. They saw the films. They saw the people jump. They knew it all factually. So why delve into such things? What purpose would it serve to talk about it? Why should I share with them the images of the bodies I saw falling from the sky? So they could have the same nightmares I was having?
If I did share that with them, I knew it meant I would have to go through it, through my feelings, to tell them. There was no way I was going to go there. Part of me felt that if I did open up and share my true feelings, they’d say, “Wow, he’s really messed up. He needs help.” This was true, but I didn’t want them to worry about me. And if I talked about it with them as often as I was thinking about it, I feared they’d think, “Listen to him. He constantly brings it up. He’s not moving on.” I wanted them to think I was getting over it.
When I got right down to it, could I accurately explain to them what I really, really felt? Could I describe to them what it really felt like when I heard that building go pop behind me and I was like, Holy shit, I’m fucked. I’m going to die? Could I really explain how scared I was or the ugliness I saw with my own eyes? I didn’t have the tools or the vocabulary to talk about it in terms that could give it its due. I knew—at least I thought I knew—it would eat my parents up to know that I thought I lost them forever and that there was a moment that I feared was my last moment. No, no, no. I didn’t want to dig around down there. I didn’t want to feel that vulnerability again. That’s what those 9/11 terrorist motherfuckers did to me. They made me feel vulnerable. They took away my invincibility, my ability to see life whole, to see life as good, to simply talk with my parents, my brother, my sisters, my wife. I was forced into these feelings. They put me under that fucking van, scared to lose all of it.
My friends and my family wanted me to talk about this. So not only did the terrorists put me under that van, but because I survived, they forced me to go back under
it and feel those feelings again in order to get past them. I was a thirty-eight-year-old man. I didn’t want to feel weak, helpless, scared, lost, or guilty. Talking about it forced me to relive it. Not talking about it forced me to live in fear of having to talk about it.
No, I didn’t die. So I had no right to feel that bad, or any bad. But dammit, I did, and it was making everyone else around me feel bad too.
It was often hardest around friends. It sat between us like an elephant in the room. I wanted them to understand what I was going through, and they wanted to understand it too, but how could they understand it if I refused to talk to them about it? Oftentimes, I would be with a friend whom I had not seen in a while, and I’d actually want to talk about it. They knew me. They could see there was something on my mind, but I always felt that whatever the time was that we were together was the wrong time to do it. How was I supposed to broach the subject? Say, “Hey, congratulations on your son’s first communion, but let me tell you how fucked up I am”? The frustration and awkwardness was palpable. In these situations, I felt painful distance from friends and from the friendly occasions that brought us together.
That is how alienation feels. You’re out with your buddies, and you remember your role in the relationship as the carefree, fun-loving guy, but you can’t plug in to it. Something’s blocking you. And everyone else is rocking and having a blast, and you say to yourself, This doesn’t seem like so much fun anymore. I wanted so badly to connect. I would ask Joy, “Why isn’t it the same with my friends anymore?” It was because I wasn’t the same.
Reluctant Hero Page 17