Safety

There have been many eloquent articles written and films made about the impending 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 tomorrow.  I do not by any means think anything I have to say will compare to what others are writing/saying, but the date has impacted me this week in a way that I never would have expected it to.

Ten years ago, on this day (the tenth), I put in my two weeks notice at a job I hated and then the following day, the world changed.  I knew people living in the city at the time but thankfully no one I knew was harmed.  The events there did not touch my life in the way that they did for so many others, but it occurred to me this week that the attacks that day are a touchstone in what would come to be one of the most difficult periods of my life.

My mom was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in the summer of 1998 just three weeks after I moved back from a two year stint in Florida.  The serendipity of my return at that time is not lost on me.  She received treatment, went in to remission, and then had a relapse in the fall of 1999.  We spent January of 2000 in Wichita at a cancer treatment center where she had a stem cell transplant.  At that time, I was attending Bethany College and trying to finish up my long overdue B.A.  In the fall of 2000, my good friend Jason and I took a trip to NYC.  Neither of us had ever been and it was a bit like walking into a fairy tale for me.  I had always idolized New York, had thought for years that I would live there at some point, and so I was mesmerized while there.  I even have a picture I took standing between the two towers, leaning as far back as I could to try to glimpse the tops.

My younger brother graduated on the same day as I, he went through in the traditional four years while I took a more, um, Bohemian approach.  I realize now how ashamed I was to have taken so long to finish, how much I berated myself for not going through in four years, for being such a--in my terms--fuck up.  No one else would have said this of me, but I said it to myself, and often.  Then, just a month after graduation, mu baby brother got married and I again felt ashamed.  No one was telling me I should have done those things before him, but I told myself I should have, and it led to feeling badly about myself.

What does this have to do with 9/11?  Well, when Mom got sick, I never let myself get really upset because I thought if I fell apart, everyone else would, too. I held it together so others would have a strong model, or so I told myself.  I think I really was just terrified of letting myself feel anything, and so I didn't.  And then the shame spiral of the next year or so followed me around like a hungry dog, getting angrier and more violent until I was living in an apartment in Lawrence and working a job I hated in KC.  So, I quit the job--thanks in part to a lawsuit that settled and gave me a little cash--and had pipe dreams of possibly moving to, you guessed it, NYC.  But, then...9/11.

The legacy of 9/11 for me isn't monumental, it's not heartbreaking or even all that poignant, but that event signifies the end of a dream I'd had for a really long time.  I sat in my apartment talking on the phone to Jason all day (after being sent home from work), and waited to hear other cities were being attacked.  I kept expecting more damage to be done, and I held my breath in a perpetual state of anxiety.

And this whole week, I've been thinking that I'm still sort of in that place.  All glimmers of the world as a safe place flew out the window for me when Mom got sick, when I shamed myself for my long road to education and for my even longer--and still winding--road to love, and then the final support beams were blown out when the towers came down.

A man I work with said we may not be daily effected by what happened, but we are all intimately effected, even if we don't realize exactly how, and I think he's right.  It was a small piece in the puzzle of my fear-based life, and I let all of those events lead me to make decisions motivated by a need for safety, even in the most unsafe of situations.

In this next decade, I hope to move past this fear based thinking and live a life dictated by complete faith in love because where there is radical honesty and true love, there will always be safety.