Shortly before I moved away from NYC, I called a 9/11 help line and described some symptoms I’d been having. I couldn’t sleep without worrying about the five upper floors of my apartment building crashing down and crushing me. I thought about explosions or random violence every time I entered the subway. I’d grown afraid of heights, and I sometimes had anxiety attacks on airplanes.
“I’m not a physician,” she said, kind but careful not to commit herself or her non-profit organization to anything, “but what you’re describing sounds like post-traumatic stress syndrome. Many people who experienced the attacks, especially eye witnesses, have these problems. I have a couple groups I can recommend to you, or, if you’d prefer, a private counselor.”
I took the names of the groups. I didn’t go. For that moment, it was enough to hear that what I was experiencing was reasonable, normal, shared by others. I really couldn’t fall asleep without thinking about buildings falling on me in the dark. Not ever. Not one single time in any of the nights between 9/11 and May 2006, when I left New York City once and for all. In those years, I knew that my life was, if not falling apart, then not progressing. I was hauling around a weight of terror and sadness that was making real happiness or progress impossible. Many days, I dragged myself from home to job to grocery store and back home, and I was always exhausted.
Having a life that had, over nearly a decade in the city, finally come together, didn’t help. I had an amazing apartment, a job I adored, great friends, but those happy things only coexisted with the great darknesss. Even falling in love didn’t overcome it. The fear and anxiety monster always lurked just out of site, and came out with a vengeance every night when I turned the lights off, or in the subway, or at other times without warning, and often swamped me completely.
I knew, in the end, that leaving New York City was the only thing that was going to save me. And it did. I’ve never had one of those visions – airless, terrifying, crushing – of the building falling down on me in another city. I even get through plane flights much more easily now. And in the past few years, when I’ve gone back to visit New York, I’ve barely thought about my old relationship with it – the darkness, the feelings of asphyxiation.
I have to go back for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Recording this milestone anywhere else in the world would be completely inadequate. I’m going to retrace my steps from that morning, going with my husband toward the site and, I imagine, telling him stories about what I saw then and how that day went. We’ll walk past my old workplace, where, of course, I stopped on that day, and continue the last five blocks to the site itself, and no doubt join crowds of others who feel called there. I know there are dozens of events and rituals scheduled. I don’t know if I’ll want to have anything to do with any of them. But I want to be there, and I believe – we’ll see if I’m right, but I believe – that this will mark a new era in moving on. Putting the demons down.
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