The 9/11 Story that I Never Told

I’ve been having heart palpitations all week.

They’re coming and going at random and I can’t tell if they’re happening when I get anxious, or if I get anxious because they’re happening. The last time this happened my friend asked her cardiologist mom what I should do and she said “take a walk.” I’ve spoken to my doctor about them and they’re attributed to nothing but stress. Stress changes how my heart beats.

I’m pretty familiar with this state of being by now, having been managing an anxiety disorder for the last 20 years. It’s not a coincidence that the other thing happening all week is a lot of talk of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It’s on NPR, my podcasts, my news feeds, my emails. It’s inescapable. When I told my longtime therapist about my heart weirdness, she reminded me of this. She asked me where that anxiety was living in me, what temperature it was, and if it reminded me of any other time in my life. She was referring to when all this was ignited for me, when 9/11 awakened a lifetime’s worth of latent anxiety that had been swirling undetected under my surface.

Given this milestone, there’s been a lot of reflection and retrospection happening about how 9/11 changed various generations of people, especially those of us who were New Yorkers at the time. I’ve heard stories that are much worse than mine. But since my heart is beating strangely and since I spent the 10th anniversary crying uncontrollably, I figured I would finally tell my story. Because I never have, not in writing and not to more than a handful of people closest to me – and because it might help me get through this weekend without crumpling up somewhere in a corner.

So.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was 23 years old, and I’d lived in New York for a little over a year, fresh out of college. I lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn with a friend, and I worked near Columbus Circle for a Broadway press agent-turned-producer with a reputation for lunacy – a reputation well earned.

That morning I was on the 2 train from Brooklyn into Manhattan, which went directly under the World Trade Center. When the train stopped there, I woke out of my daze because something odd happened: instead of the droves of people that usually got off at this downtown hub, a crowd of people instead rushed onto the train. I’ll never forget the group of three people who were laughing, in a kind of mixture of relief and confusion. The demeanors of everyone were varied, and as I looked around trying to figure out what was going on, someone looked down at me and asked “Do you know what happened?” “No,” I said.

“A plane hit a building up there.”

No one had really absorbed the gravity of what was taking place, or that it was a Twin Tower that had been hit. It was the North one only at that point, but I think by the time I made it to Columbus Circle the South tower had also been hit. I’m fairly certain that I was on one of the last trains that made it through there that morning.

When I emerged from the subway I went to my phone – maybe the first mobile phone I’d ever had – and I didn’t have service. As I approached the office, my producer boss ran out in slight hysterics yelling “The Mall’s on fire! The Mall’s on fire!” As I rushed inside where he had the TV on, I slowly started collecting bits of the news. He’d been referring, of course, to the Washington Mall, where my mother worked at the time, so I was instantly thrown into panic about her safety, while somewhere in DC my mother was panicking about mine.

The rest of that morning is like many other New Yorkers’ stories. I finally reached my parents by landline, and let them all know I was okay. My mom was fine – the Mall attack had been false news, and it was the Pentagon that was hit. My boss made his small staff of young people stay with him; it was the day of the first rehearsal of an off-Broadway show he was producing so we all walked to the rehearsal hall. Only one actor had shown up. All together we watched more footage on the TV in their office. It was starting to sink in.

He took us to lunch. The restaurant was crowded and he made off-color jokes to the wait staff, who were rattled. We were all miserable and distracted, wanting to go crawl under a blanket with people we loved. I do remember one clumsy, prescient thing he said in trying to make conversation: “This is going to create so much hate toward the people who are responsible for it.” We knew what he meant.

Back to the office he took us, and tried to get us all to focus on work. After a short time, we just started walking out. I told him no one else was working today; there was no work to be done. The city was in chaos. He could fire me if he wanted to, but I needed to leave. He didn’t stop me. I walked from Columbus Circle to a friend’s house on the Upper East Side, passing the restaurant I used to work at. My friends still working there looked very busy, and like they wanted to be doing anything else. Strangers were being uncomfortably polite to each other. It was like we all weren’t sure how to continue being in the world that day.

My friend was home. She’d been there all morning with her roommate, neither of them having left for work yet when it all started. Like most other humans that day, we watched the footage over and over and over. We eventually went on a walk that evening. I remember running into a classmate from college who was also wandering the streets. I found out later that he’d lost someone close to him in the Towers that day.

I couldn’t get back to Brooklyn for several days, and when I finally rode the train home, everyone looked shaken. I heard one person talking on their phone about how they were still holding out hope that their family member would be found.

My 9/11 story isn’t really about that day. Compared to the many others I’ve been listening to and reading all week, it was unremarkable. I’ve often felt like I don’t deserve to share my story, because I didn’t lose anyone that day. But I did go through a different kind of loss.

See, the story doesn’t end on September 11th. It picks up a couple of months later, in November, when I fell asleep on the subway ride home, which I frequently did because I wasn’t sleeping enough and it was a long ride. That evening, when I woke up, something was wrong. It was internal, and hard to describe. My heart was beating hard, the quality of light in the train car looked different, and I couldn’t seem to gather my thoughts. As soon as I got out, I called an old friend who was wise beyond her years and described what I was feeling; she called it a panic attack, and talked to me until I got home, curled up in bed, and started to drift off.

When I woke up I didn’t know what to make of that experience, so I tried to put it behind me. I had a few similar sensations on the subway after that, but nothing quite as frightening. Then I went home for Thanksgiving.

All I remember about how it started was that I was in a shop in the DC neighborhood of Georgetown with my mother and aunt when a wave of...something...came over me. I didn’t know what it was, just that I needed to go home. I told my mom; she listened, so I must have looked unwell, and we went right home. On autopilot, I went downstairs to the basement TV room, crawled onto the couch and under a blanket, and stayed there for three days.

My family came in and out of the room, checking on me. I stopped talking, becoming almost catatonic. Stopped showering. Barely ate. Watched some TV, and didn’t. Slept, and didn’t. I only remember some things, like that my family members didn’t really bother me about what was happening, but that they sat with me in shifts. Just sat, not asking anything of me. I remember thinking for the first time in my life that I understood why some people wanted to stop living; I didn’t feel suicidal, just like I understood that deeply lost feeling. My mom came down once and put my head in her lap, stroked my hair, and asked if I felt scared. I just nodded, and let a tear or two fall. That old friend who’d identified my panic attack came by, and got me talking a bit. I imagine my mom called her to see if a visit from her would help.

Nothing specific brought me out of it. The fog just slowly started lifting, and I eventually moved myself off the couch and upstairs. I remember that being really, really hard, like I was weighed down by bags of sand. I sipped some soup broth. I bathed. I called my boss to say that I needed a few more days before returning to work after the Thanksgiving holiday. For a lunatic, he was pretty understanding.

From then on I considered my life to be divided into two parts – before that experience, and after. Later, I would come to think of it as my life before 9/11 and my life after, and sometimes I wonder what I would be like now if that day never happened, or if I wasn’t where I was when it did. I found a therapist who I didn’t really like, but who helped to put a name to what that catatonic state was: post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. It was the kind of thing I’d only ever heard attributed to people who’d been in combat, but just giving it a name helped. It showed up first on a subway, which is where I was when 9/11 started for me, with all those souls rushing onto my train car. Trauma apparently carves out some very direct channels between moments in a life.

That time of reemergence, in which I learned how to move through my days differently, was defined by my self-education in living with a panic disorder. For me, that meant learning to recognize the oncoming, acute “fear of fear,” the swelling feeling that I might lose control of myself at any moment, and that constant containment. I took a lot of deep breaths. I wore headphones a lot, to push my thoughts outside my head by focusing on whatever I was listening to. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of “hacks”, but through decades of ups and downs I’ve found a therapist who introduced me to mindfulness and meditation. I’ve been medicated for quite awhile. I’ve trained myself in many kinds of breathing. The trauma has reared itself more mercilessly at some times than others, but the anxiety has evolved to be mostly manageable.

I’ll leave it at this: as much as I wish we lived in a world where 9/11 never happened, that it did, and that it sent me on this course, has me somehow ready for where we are now. Never would I have thought that 20 years later, I’d also be surviving a global pandemic with my family, or preparing “go bags”, laminating vaccine cards, and eventually moving out of the city, with the worsening climate crisis always looming somewhere in my consciousness. Like many of us, I thought for so long that post-9/11 was our dystopia.

In some tragic way, maybe it was rather the preparation that I needed. Because if I hadn’t gotten through that, I don’t know that I would have the strength – or the tools – to get through this.

And in case you’re wondering, in the time that I’ve been writing this over the course of today, my heart has been beating normally again.