I’m sorry—this post is longer than usual. 9/11 brings up lots of thoughts and memories for me. Thanks in advance for reading or even just skimming.
For paid subscribers to Good Grief, a reminder that I’ll be hosting a grief writing hour next Wednesday, September 18, from 12 to 1 p.m. EST on Zoom. I’ll send an email with a Zoom link to subscribers tomorrow. Please feel free to join a safe space to process grief through writing. It’ll be my first time hosting, so I’m not sure what to tell you to expect. Please show up and find out!
A huge thank you to my subscribers, both free and paid. And to readers just finding me for the first time.
The summer of 2001 is my hardest on record.
My mom died the year before, fourth-stage colon cancer.
I was 26, working a job that terrified me and I was failing at, not making enough money to cover my bills, commuting from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan, and descending into ever darker depression daily. Drinking way too much. Occasionally considering walking into traffic. Running toward it once or twice.
Scaring myself and everyone around me.
I was falling apart and sometimes wanted to hasten the process.
My best friend and roommate was leaving me to get married and move to Missouri. Another best friend dumped me for a friend she said was better at facing her grief. My therapist was leaving me to go run a mental health care facility in New Jersey. The guy I wasn’t dating told me he “loved me but wasn’t in love with me,” meaning we should probably stop sleeping together. I knew this and didn’t disagree, and still it broke me.
The abandonment was coming wave after wave after wave.
Each new loss threatened my life. Because I saw it as further confirmation I was bad and deserved to be punished. And that bad things would never stop happening.
My relationship with my father was the trauma from which all other trauma in my life sprang. And I was left with just him to help me in my trauma.
It was like a f*cked-up joke I couldn’t laugh at.
I was hospitalized four times during the summer of 2001. Three times briefly in psych wards—including once at the infamous Bellevue, where I was molested by another patient while left on a gurney overnight in the hallway. Not helping my trauma recovery process.
These psych ward stays were some of the most terrifying experiences of my life and someday I may be able to write about them but not yet. They were against my will, after I was determined a risk to myself for ingesting large quantities of drugs and alcohol. They included, as most psych ward stays do, a complete loss of autonomy and freedom. They also included being treated like I was a crazy moron by people not that smart, but in charge. These stays were also all extremely dangerous, because I was much less a risk to others in these settings than others were to me.
These three experiences alone could have made the summer of 2001 the worst of my life. To say nothing of the stack of profound losses precipitating them.
In addition to the psych ward stays, I also spent six weeks in an in-patient eating disorder unit at Cornell Westchester. I agreed to go willingly to this one and was part of checking myself in. It wasn’t as traumatizing as the psych ward stays, but it wasn’t what I’d call a great time either.
I remember furtively doing sit-ups and push ups in my room when my roommate went to the bathroom. (I was prohibited from exercising. Exercising is an integral part of what keeps me sane.) I remember the women who returned from ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) looking dazed and confused and more broken than when they left. I remember the woman who had to be fed intravenously, moving through the halls carting along a bag of nutrients keeping her alive. I remember repeatedly being scolded for folding my legs under my body at the table in the cafeteria. This was autistic stimming, not me trying to hide food. But no one there could recognize the autism. No one in the entire eating disorder unit at one of the best hospitals in the country understood the connections between eating disorders and autism. Nor did they seem to understand much at all about trauma. Psychological care has done SO MUCH DAMAGE to neurodivergent people suffering from trauma. Which includes most people with eating disorders. SMH.
This newsletter is not about my grief and frustration about the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry and the DANGER and inanity of people who don’t understand trauma or neurodivergence being in charge of treating neurodivergent people with trauma.
I had no idea how enraged I was at the fields of psychology and psychiatry during the summer of 2001. I was just starting my research. Now, a quarter century in, I understand so much more of what I was experiencing that fateful summer. Also that I was performing imbedded journalism. Researching psych wards from the inside. While largely sane.
The summer of 2001 was the worst of my life.
I nearly died more than once and had to be hospitalized for my own safety. Nothing about the hospitalizations were safe, further compounding the major depressive disorder colliding with autistic burnout careening into eating disorder and addiction. On top of the complex PTSD.
I was in the worst place I had ever been.
And people were leaving me one after another.
“You are too much.” “I cannot deal.” “You are crazy.” “I am getting away from you.”
This was the summer of 2001.
Recognizing that it was a pretty brutal summer, my cousin Emily very generously invited me to go on an Alaskan cruise with her the first week in September. Ending a summer spent on short-term disability leave bouncing in and out of hospitals.
The Alaskan cruise was incredible, a geographic reset I desperately needed, an infusion of natural beauty, active adventures in picturesque settings, valuable time with a cousin I’d known since birth.
I returned from Alaska on September 9th and to work in midtown Manhattan on September 10, 2001. My first day back in four months.
I don’t remember much about that day. I don’t think I felt ready to be back at work, and I’d hated it desperately when I left. I’m sure I wasn’t feeling calm or comfortable. I was also coming back after taking a notable absence due to mental illness. Fun times for a shame-riddled girl who really just wanted to disappear and have no one ever see her. Not write a cover story for a major news publication with millions of readers. As I was being pushed to do.
On Tuesday, September 11th, I arrived at work at about 8 a.m.
Getting in before everyone else has always helped me manage my neurodivergence at work. Being able to settle in and prepare mentally before being confronted with lots of demands and other people’s energy is how I have been able to work in high-stress, high-volume offices. That and sometimes retreating under my desk. And walking the halls a lot. Eventually, only coming in a couple days a week.
I was there early and almost no one else was. At BusinessWeek, people often didn’t roll in until 10, unless a morning meeting required them sooner. No morning meeting this Tuesday.
So I was one of the only people at my desk when one of the science editors came walking by to say a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I walked with him over two sets of cubicles to get a straight view of the towers. My cube was on the 39th floor of an office building at 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
Looking due south, I could see dark grey smoke billowing out of a huge hole in one of the towers.
As I stood there watching dark grey smoke billow out of a huge hole in one of the towers, I saw a second plane hit the second tower.
My brain started spinning.
I returned to my desk and called my dad. I’m sure he was in bed reading the newspaper, still in his pajamas. I don’t think I knew yet about the Pentagon. I don’t think I was calling my dad because I was worried about him in DC.
I was calling my dad to break the news.
My father’s response when I told him planes had flown into the Twin Towers?
“That was very imaginative.”
I’m not sure what response I expected, but it wasn’t that.
He wasn’t wrong. My dad wasn’t often wrong about much. He just saw things without always remembering the people at the middle of them.
My thoughts were on the people in office towers in Manhattan where planes had just crashed into buildings. Maybe because I was in an office tower in Manhattan.
My dad’s thoughts were on the thinking behind a terrorist attack that would change the world forever. Not on his daughter in an office tower in midtown Manhattan. Or anyone else’s sons or daughters in Lower Manhattan office towers.
My boss at the time made choices that made things harder for some. Including calling the whole team into her office, delegating responsibilities, and telling everyone to work fast because “we might be next.”
The task she gave me was to attend to people who were freaking out too much to work. This was one of the more trauma-informed moves she made. And so I began to focus my attention on a friend and colleague who was quite understandably panicking about her fiancee, who worked in a building adjacent to the towers.
I saw the first tower fall as I was trying to help this friend breathe and think and remember how to gather information.
I didn’t see the first plane hit or the second tower fall in real time. I saw the second plane hit and the first tower fall. Watching it like a movie play out outside the huge glass windows of my midtown office building.
I don’t honestly remember much more of that day. Just that I stopped fearing imminent attack on midtown and ended up staying until late that evening, when the trains had resumed running underneath Lower Manhattan. My roommates walked home much earlier in the day across the Brooklyn Bridge. But I stayed at work so late the F train was running again to take me back to Windsor Terrace.
A major terrorist attack right between my home and office on my second day back to work after an extended leave due to psychotic breaks did not make my return to BusinessWeek better or easier. Nor did traveling through Lower Manhattan every day from home to work. It was a hard time for everyone, and especially those of us with fragile brains held together by thin strands of bubble gum.
Within months I found myself in a problematic relationship with a Brooklyn boy who lost a good friend in the towers. About to lose my job because of extreme writer’s block and associated drinking.
No, 9/11 did not help pull me out. I wasn’t yet at my bottom on 9/11 and it took me even deeper.
I was about to lose my job at BusinessWeek because the more they pushed me toward a cover story the more I needed to hide. I was in way too much active trauma to have millions of people reading my words.
Which is how I came to lead content creation for a public information campaign for the City of New York. To promote economic redevelopment in Lower Manhattan. We launched the website on the first anniversary of 9/11. I was editor for the next five years.
On September 11, 2002, I gathered before dawn with thousands of journalists, firefighters, and police to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan to converge at Ground Zero.
I took pictures on the walk in and my boss immediately wanted to publish them on the website. I’d never before had anyone want to publish my photographs. I’d never before had anyone tell me I could take good photographs. I didn’t know I could take good photographs.
I also didn’t know I could learn a lot of tech and dive deep into website development on the front and back ends. That I could lead a staff of reporters and produce daily content in six categories for hundreds of thousands of readers. That I could read every news clip about 9/11 for multiple years. Immersing in trauma and trauma recovery like the imbedded journalist I am.
That I could get to know so many people who lost loved ones, homes, businesses, jobs, safety, security, peace. Day in and day out.
Holding other people’s grief—many other people’s grief—helped me overcome the deep grief of my own life and come around to starting over instead of giving up.
It is because of the role 9/11 played in my life that I know my purpose on Earth is to help others with trauma recovery. It is also how I learned so much of what I know about trauma recovery.
Including and especially that different people need different things. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach to trauma recovery. Which is why you need to write for multiple audiences simultaneously if you want to help people recover.
That job I got because I was about to lose the job I hated at BusinessWeek saved my life in so many ways. Most importantly, by teaching me so much about trauma and trauma recovery. Giving me the tools I needed to recover from my own trauma while helping me gain the experience and know-how to share what I’ve learned at scale.
How to learn how to run a multi-channel communications campaign about trauma recovery targeting multiple audiences simultaneously?
On someone else’s dime is my preference.
With a million-dollar budget and people to handle the finance and admin parts that don’t interest me as much. My focus was the content. How to create content about trauma recovery programs to reach people who lived in, worked in, and visited Lower Manhattan. To get them to take advantage of assistance designed to help the community rebuild, recover, and return stronger and more resilient.
I was part of a large propaganda machine run by the City and State of New York and my dad never wanted to speak of it. Except that time when I was in a picture on the front page of the New York Times above the fold. I was photographed as a reporter covering part of the process to select a design for the Freedom Tower and 9/11 Memorial Museum.
I knew then why my dad was so disappointed in my work but I focused on the trauma recovery parts, not the propaganda parts.
My father made no effort to mask his disapproval of my choices in jobs. I’m not sure which he found more disappointing, business journalism or political machine.
I tried not to focus on his disapproval and instead focused on learning how to run a large-scale information campaign.
Had my dad been able to put his disapproval aside, we might have had some great conversations about communications. My dad was not able to put his disapproval aside. Except when his kid appeared on the front page of the New York Times above the fold. 😂 My proud hypocritical papa.
A tragedy that took loved ones and livelihood and safety and security from many people I came to know and love was also a turning point for me. A turning point that helped me focus on other people’s suffering to keep from drowning in my own.
And it is because I reached such a turning point once already in life that I have known I will make it through any future hardships I face. Getting me through all of the hardships I’ve faced since.
This cool thing happens when you spend five years reporting on trauma recovery, resilience, rebuilding, and rebirth. You learn A LOT about trauma recovery, resilience, rebuilding, and rebirth.
Making me extremely grateful—I know, this is my grief newsletter—to have been studying how to recover from sh!t that threatens to kill you for a very long time from a great many people. Including by feeling your grief.
9/11 taught me how to feel grief. In the midst of wanting to run from my own overwhelming grief. 9/11 taught me how to feel grief by focusing my attention on the grief of others.