Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  Randomly I yank a word from the book and start using it, completely unaware of its meaning. My favorite is hobgoblin. I love the sound of it. I start calling everyone hobgoblin, just because. “You’re one crazy girl,” Taby says with a laugh. But I know she likes it.

  I’d met Taby once before, at Noyes, a detention center slightly less menacing than Montrose, and we became friends immediately. She was short and bouncy, the kind of girl who was always ready for an adventure. In that way, she made the time at Noyes easier, because she filled the room with sparks of possibility. So when she arrived here at the Jackson Unit, we tackled each other to the ground in a hug. We’re family; we share a life most people know nothing about.

  She and I go outside and throw horseshoes together as the sun is setting. “I’m really glad you’re here, Rita,” Taby says to me. She’s looking out at the mountains. Her eyes are blue as wildflowers.

  “I’m glad you’re here, too.” I look out beside her, and the light begins to smolder.

  Ms. Hanlin is a night counselor on the unit. She’s a large woman, and her spider black hair, regardless of the weather, is invariably frizzy and unkempt. Her skin is sallow and pocked, but at night, when I lie in bed and look up at her face, just before she bends down to hug me and turn out the lights for the night, she is as beautiful as anything.

  I share a room with a perky but capricious girl named Tina. She is someone who would always be described as cute, but never beautiful. She has freckles and a bob haircut and an upturned nose that gets pink in the sun. At night, we lie awake and tell secrets in the dark until our voices get tired from whispering.

  One night she asks me if I’ve ever kissed a girl.

  I pause for a moment, deciding whether or not to tell the truth. “Yes,” I confess, “but it was never a girl I wanted to kiss.”

  “Is there a girl that you have wanted to kiss?” Her question makes my body stir.

  “I don’t know yet,” I say. “What about you?”

  Now she pauses. “I don’t know yet, either.”

  Then we both shift in our beds for a long time, without saying a word.

  FORTY-THREE

  After I spoke to myself that afternoon in the shower, I was never afraid to shower again. And I stopped being afraid of staircases, though it took a little while for my brain to believe it. My heart would still speed up, and I’d think, Silly heart, you’re okay. And I’d climb the stairs, and my heart would be racing, and my amygdala would say, Panic?, and I’d say, I don’t know, maybe. But then, I’d gather myself like pages starting to scatter in a wind, and I’d say, No. I began to go to the grocery store alone again, too, though for a while I kept to the twelve-items-or-less lane, and even then sometimes I had to put down my basket at the end of an aisle and flee to my car, where I would sit and breathe and try to ground myself by focusing on things around me—the sky, the people coming and going, the scent of the air. Then I’d go back inside and make it through with my twelve items or less. My night terrors still came, though less frequently. And I stopped wearing my panic button, but usually kept it nearby. I liked knowing it was there.

  I still couldn’t drive on the highway.

  Sometimes I panicked for no reason at all, which was always discouraging because I worried that maybe I would never be free from it. But I was also learning that healing is a jagged trajectory, a dance of forward and back, like most things. I was relearning the basics of life—like a routine I’d known and forgotten—and it would take time.

  “Now you can work out again,” Larry said. He had just put on his running shoes and was heading downstairs to the treadmill. “Do you want to come?”

  My first reaction was to say, Ask me again next year. But I knew that this was exactly the kind of thing I had to push myself to do. It was a chance to suffer my suffering! So I put on my running shoes.

  “I’m only going to do it for a few minutes,” I informed him. It’s true that I was scared, but I also knew that I needed to set small attainable goals for myself and build on those goals, in order to slowly start breaking the association in my brain between ordinary things and danger. If I panicked on the treadmill, it would only reinforce a belief that treadmills were dangerous things. Get on, get off—that was my plan.

  But the same second I got on, I wanted to get off, and I realized that voluntary suffering is really hard. And I hadn’t even started the machine yet. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Of course you’re ready,” Larry said. “I’m right here.”

  So I started the treadmill and began to walk at a very slow speed. Everything in me was screaming, Noooooo, and ruuuuuuun, and fuuuuuuuck, and my heart was already rocketing off, and my face felt cold and tingly, and I said, “I really don’t think I’m ready.”

  And Larry said, “C’mon, you can do this.”

  “Look,” I said, holding out my hand, “I’m shaking.”

  “But I’m right here. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. I’m right here.” He was exasperated, which was completely understandable. There is nothing logical about panic.

  Unfortunately, it was too late. I was already panicking. “I’m just not ready,” I said, getting off. I paced rapidly for a minute or two, then sat down on the edge of a chair and began to rock myself in small movements, waiting for the panic to subside, all while Larry watched me from across the room. He just stood there looking, the way you focus on a thing moving in the woods, trying to understand what it is.

  Back at Opther’s, I asked him, “Are you afraid of death?”

  He had his hand over my sternum, and I was relaxing into my breathing, into the ethereal music playing softly, into his hand.

  “No,” he said. “I actually look forward to it.”

  “You look forward to death?” I was astonished. “Why?”

  “Because it’s peaceful. I like the idea of finally being able to drift into nothingness—no more pressure, no more struggle.”

  I wanted to ask him if his life felt like a lot of pressure, because it seemed a strange impulse to look forward to death, but I kept breathing instead. He placed his hand on my abdomen, and I breathed, and then on my low abdomen, and I breathed, and I thought about death. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, we used to chant as children, lifting each other up. How exciting those nights were, when we played at the netherworld, when we closed our eyes and let ourselves be lifted to the heavens.

  The next day, I put my running shoes back on. Larry was napping on the sofa, his book and mouth open. I slipped down to the basement and started my music. I eyed the treadmill, its unassuming gray scale of steadiness. Hi, I said. I remembered reading a Tom Robbins book in which inanimate objects had secret animate lives, and I thought better to make friends, just in case.

  One group I can recommend for anyone seeking the inspiration to step onto a treadmill is the Black Eyed Peas, which is exactly how I got myself walking a grand three miles per hour on mine. My goal was small—five minutes—and it had one rule: I could not stop, no matter what. Of course, the first thing my body wanted to do was stop. I felt that swoosh of panic in my head and that jittery burst in my legs. But then there was the song, that steady beat, and my legs kept going. About three minutes in, I even dared to increase the speed for exactly five seconds before pressing the down arrow. At around the 4:40 minute mark, I realized I might make it, and I started to walk with real purpose, counting down to my five-minute finish line. I even went an extra two seconds, just because I could.

  I called my poet friend Meg to brag about my victory.

  “Great,” she said. “But how’s your writing?”

  “You know how it is. I write to you.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean your writing life.”

  “Did you hear what I said? I walked on the treadmill. For five minutes!”

  “Just think about it. You’re part of a co
mmunity—you just have to connect to it.”

  After Meg told me to write to her about panic, we started writing things to each other daily—lists, mostly, of things we encountered each day. “No ideas but in things,” said the great poet William Carlos Williams, so I wandered around with my notebook as I did when I was a child, observing my little world: Larry floating on his back in the pool and wearing perhaps a little too much paste-white sunscreen on his face, the lulling sounds of splashing water, the jeweled body of a dragonfly, bits of conversation overheard at a gas station, the sagging roof of an abandoned building, a woman falling and breaking her hip in a bookstore, the first five minutes of the local news. And as I filled the pages of my notebook, two things were happening: I was beginning to reconnect to the world I’d grown so devastatingly afraid of, and I was writing again.

  So when Meg said it was time to connect to a writing community, I took her advice. That day I called a nonprofit writing center in Boston and scheduled an interview for a teaching position. But on the day of my interview, I was terrified. Larry generously came to support me by waiting in the lobby, only we discovered upon arriving that there was no lobby—just the one small room in the middle of the writing center, which turned out to be the interview room. When the director, a handsome man with soulful eyes, came out, I was already in the middle of one long panic attack, like a cresting wave that wouldn’t end. I shook his hand, and introduced him to Larry, and we sat down. I wondered if he could hear the fear in my voice when I laughed and tried to explain that I thought there would be a waiting room.

  Chris nodded thoughtfully. “It’s such a struggle, space.”

  I’d never been able to fully keep my composure during a panic attack, but I was determined not to blow it for myself. So I pretended to sit calmly by crossing my legs and folding my hands in my lap, while my heart, small fist that it is, was knocking furiously on the inside of my chest. “I really loved your poems,” Chris said, looking down at my file in his lap. “Especially the one about the circus freaks.”

  “Ah, yes, the circus freaks. Thank you.”

  Chris launched ahead into the interview, asking me various questions about my teaching style and about the poets who’ve inspired me. And as we talked about writers, my heart started to slow—as if I were singing it a lullaby: Rilke, Bishop, Neruda, Oliver—and I was able to calm down and have a real conversation with this man who was smart and self-deprecating and impossible not to like. But then I did a risky thing: I confessed I’d been suffering from panic disorder. “I’m coming through it now,” I said. “But I’m not totally out of the woods.”

  Chris looked at me compassionately.

  “Also, I want you to know that if you hire me, I won’t bring my husband to every class I teach.”

  We all laughed, and Chris shared that he, too, had struggled with panic attacks in the past. Then he hired me.

  Mostly, life to me feels like a lot of stumbling, punctuated by rare moments of grace—those moments when everything is exactly right, when the heart wants nothing. That’s what I found in Chris, this kind man who was holding my poems and telling me, in his way, You are more than your panic. And you and I are members of the same tribe.

  That night, I curled up on the sofa next to Larry, nestling like a puppy into the side of him. “Thank you,” I said.

  Larry glanced down at me. “For what?”

  “For leaving work early to come with me today.”

  He shrugged his shoulders as if it were nothing. “Of course.”

  “Do you remember when we were first dating, and you talked about life being like a boat—a smallish boat—and that you wanted me in yours?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “I’m glad we’re sharing a boat.”

  With two fingers, he swept a few strands of hair off my forehead. “So am I.”

  Around that same time, I filled out an application for a waiter scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. This was the conference of conferences, and the waiter scholarships are part of a long-standing tradition whereby the recipients—budding writers who are chosen based on the merit of their writing samples—serve meals to the rest of the conference goers in exchange for their own meals, lodging, and tuition. I had always wanted to go, but when Larry read an article in The New Yorker that referred to it as “Bed Loaf,” he said, “I hope you never go there,” so I never applied. But now more than ever I knew Meg was right: I needed to be a part of a writing community again, not only as a teacher but as a student. I also knew that these waiter scholarships were competitive—only twenty-five were given each year—which made me feel somewhat relieved because I was unlikely to get one. Still, I was challenging myself to do things that were outside my sphere of comfort, and going away to the mountains for eleven days with a bunch of strangers certainly fell into that outer region. When I dropped my application in the mail, I told myself that if they accepted me, I’d be ready.

  My life was starting to take on a rhythm. I had my clay class every Friday, and I was amassing a multiseasonal collection of floppy-eared dog plates. My plate-dog frolicked in the snow, swam in the ocean, stood under a rainbow, stared out from a bed of flowers, contemplated the stars. In the mornings, I started showing up at my computer and attempting to write seriously again, even if that meant writing one sentence, even if it meant deleting that one sentence and then writing and deleting fifty more. But I didn’t think it was fair to teach writing classes if I wasn’t writing myself.

  In the evenings I started making jewelry again, and it felt like a homecoming to hold all those stones in my hands. I cooked, I sang hymns (badly), I walked on the treadmill a little longer each day. But even as my days began to coalesce back into something that felt like a life, that life was still held under the jurisdiction of fear. When I wasn’t panicking—when my hands were full of clay or stones or pages—I was thinking about the fact that I wasn’t panicking. It was as if everything I did was measured on the scale of fear, so that even when I had days completely free from panic, I still wasn’t free from panic. This left me feeling like a pale version of my former self—injured somehow—as if I were walking with a limp nobody could see.

  While I’d appreciated my sessions with Opther, my breathing exercises had reached a plateau, so I thanked him and his wobbly table and never went back. But I still longed for someone to talk to, so I decided to try one last therapist.

  Norm was a shine-eyed man who spoke in the most soothing voice I’d ever heard. “Right this way,” he said, offering a smile, which I returned as I followed him. His office was in a tall yellow Victorian that overlooked a quiet expanse of land. It was a cheery house, and his office had windowed French doors that opened to a garden and spilled in the airy light. Spring was on its way, and the day had a frenetic feel to it—everything waking up at once.

  I told Norm about my panic attacks, about all the therapies I’d tried, how CBT left me almost catatonic. Norm nodded his head, and in that nod I found a universe of understanding.

  Because it was a first session, we’d booked extra time, during which I worked my way back to my earliest days, recounting the places where fear began for me. “. . . So my father ordered my mother to close all the windows, and I knew then that I was really in for it, that he didn’t want the neighbors to hear. He picked me up by my ankles and began to whip me with the buckle of his belt. He was hitting me everywhere, and I was crying and screaming at first, but then I started to black out, and the next sound was my sister wailing. She was only three then, but she’d lunged at him to stop him, and the belt buckle accidentally split her lip open. That’s what stopped him. He’d never hit her, not once, and never would, and yet suddenly he had made her bleed.”

  Norm looked aghast. “Why did he only hit you? Why never your sister?”

  “Because when she was a baby, she almost died. I think he always felt guilty about that—that they hadn’
t noticed how sick she was until it was almost too late. She was bleeding internally, though no one ever knew why.”

  “It’s just all so sad.”

  “And after he dropped me and the belt to the floor, I remember being so grateful to be alive, to be able to sit in the corner of our living room and gaze at a picture book of butterflies. Blue morpho was my favorite.” There was a lot to tell, and it would take years to tell it, but this was a start.

  Norm grabbed a tissue and wiped his eyes. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  I wasn’t expecting those words. Easy as they were, no one had ever said them to me before, so simply.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling terrible for making him cry. “People have it a lot worse.”

  “You had no one.” Norm blew his nose.

  “I had myself,” I said.

  “Yes, well, you have this extraordinary spirit. That’s how you survived. You got beaten, and then you looked at butterflies. You more than survived.”

  “Do you think I’ll survive panic?”

  Norm looked at me squarely. “You already are.”

  That day Norm explained that when we panic, we revert to a childlike state. “Everyone does it,” he said. “Suddenly the world seems big and scary because we feel small and helpless. Different things can trigger the child state in people—for some it’s being in a hospital gown, for others it’s an unexpected life event, for me it’s the holidays—and some people are just naturally more sensitive to it than others. But when we’re in a child state, we all tend to go home. For you, home is a very scary place.”

  “So do all people who panic have difficult childhoods?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. Some people really do panic without any obvious cause. Though there are studies that suggest that some people are more biologically prone to it.”