Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  We kept talking, and the sound of Norm’s voice was like a calm sea. “Your first panic attack wasn’t a few months ago. It was when you were eleven and thought you were having a heart attack.”

  “That was a panic attack?” I asked in disbelief. How had I never realized that?

  “You betcha. But when you ran away and had to take care of yourself, there was no room for you to slip into that child state. You couldn’t afford to. But now you’ve moved to a new place and you’re isolated—just weak enough to find yourself in a child state.”

  “But if I had my first panic attack so young, what if I’m one of those people who are biologically prone to it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The approach is the same for everyone who panics, regardless of the cause.”

  “What’s the approach?” I asked.

  “Number one, it’s compassion.”

  “Compassion,” I repeated.

  “We have to have compassion for that child place in ourselves. A lot of people tend to beat themselves up for panicking. They think, What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I afraid of such silly things? But when a child is trembling from a nightmare or convinced there’s a monster in the closet, we don’t say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you afraid of such silly things?’ Instead, we comfort the child. We have compassion. Then we open the closet door to show there’s nothing there. Of course, sometimes we have to be firm with kids—we can’t let them run the show. We have to step in as adults who are in control, but we have to do it with our hearts. That’s why CBT didn’t work for you—it’s a great system that helps many, but it’s got no heart.”

  And when he said that, I knew I’d finally found someone I could talk to. “You have heart,” I said.

  “So do you, kiddo.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Afraid, I had spent so much energy hoping for some magical mother or therapist or guru to appear and unfurl a scroll of answers into my hand—ones that would tell me which steps to take and how to feel better, less afraid—or for my own husband to sweep me up as if into the arms of God, as if in a single motion he could undo a lifetime of motion. I had no idea then that the voice that would come to me would be my own, or that what I really wanted, more than I wanted someone to give me answers, was for someone to listen.

  I wrote about Claret to Meg:

  In the night when I can’t sleep, I trespass into the stable. My trainer lives in the apartment next door, so I’m careful not to wake her. The door is roped, the lights off, but I want to feed Claret a purple carrot. I step through cautiously, the way you walk through the narrow hall of a haunted house, but soon my eyes adjust to the darkness. The moon is big and frames the windows in blue light. There are quiet sounds: small snuffles, shifts, and sighs from the stalls. I find Claret in the back, already eating. Most of his body is swallowed by the darkness of his stall. A shaft of moonlight exposes the side of his face and makes his globe eye shine. Hay pokes out of his mouth like makeshift whiskers. I break the carrot in half and feed it to him through the bars. He takes it from my hand soft as a kiss. His chewing is the sound of walking through snow. It is the sound of taking, of contentment. After the carrot, he returns to his hay, disappearing entirely as he bends to take a bite. In between he pops back up to watch me. His eye is a night lake.

  FORTY-FIVE

  After I’d had a few more sessions with Norm, he introduced me to a type of therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Because he’d diagnosed me not only with panic disorder but also with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), he thought this approach would be especially useful. Many people who suffer from panic disorder without any prior trauma can suffer from PTSD, because panic attacks themselves are a type of trauma. EMDR addresses that trauma by helping patients reprocess the scary residue of panic—or any event—until it’s no longer scary. Here’s essentially how it works: the patient is asked to recall a traumatic memory. While she is doing so, the therapist moves a pencil or other object back and forth in front of the patient’s eyes, and the patient follows the movement while recalling the memory, and continues to do this until the memory stops being frightening. Though the science isn’t conclusive regarding how EMDR actually works, many people believe that it works via synchronization between the two hemispheres of the brain, while other people attribute its success to relaxation or distraction.

  In my case, we started by focusing on the core negative belief: I’m not safe. The first memory I chose was my first panic attack.

  Norm was holding a pencil in his hand. “Okay, now I want you to remember that first panic attack and tell me what feelings or words come up for you. Just follow my hand with your eyes.”

  As Norm waved the pencil back and forth, I found myself unable to concentrate on the memory. The eye movements made me uncomfortable, and I started getting anxious. “I don’t like moving my eyes like that,” I told him.

  “Good. That’s good you told me. I have something else for you then. We can do this another way.” Norm opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of earphones. “Try this,” he said. “You’ll hear alternating beeps on each side.”

  I put on the earphones and the beeps began. They reminded me of those hearing tests that make you raise your left and right hands. I closed my eyes and started with the memory of my first panic attack, but my mind quickly took me elsewhere. It took me to a dream. I opened my eyes. “I switched memories.”

  “That’s okay. What did you remember?”

  “It was a dream I used to have as a kid.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My parents are taking me to this place, and I don’t know why. All I know is that something is very wrong with me. When we walk into the building, they’re holding my hands, but not in a sweet way—in a way that says you can’t escape. The room is steely, steeped in blue light, and is full of people. It’s some kind of hospital, but worse. And they’re all looking at me—they’ve been waiting for me—because they’ve never seen anything like this before—anything so wrong with a person. Some of them are even crying because of it. And I’m really scared. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the same memory and see what comes up for you. Just follow your mind where it wants to take you.”

  This time when the beeping started and I closed my eyes, I could see the dream more vividly, as if I were dreaming it again. I watched my parents leading me and could feel the light on my face, cold and metallic, like their hands. I saw the people crying, all of them gathering around, and I was tiny compared to them. My wrists poked out from my old blue coat, bony and pale, and the faux fur around the hood was matted and dirty. But then the dream changed, started happening in real time: I enter the dream as my adult self. I see the girl; I see her parents; I see all of the people. And I run to her. She looks up at me, and her face is pale, and I say, “C’mon, you’re going with me. I’m getting you the hell out of here.” And I wrestle her away from them. Then I hold a sign up to everyone in the room: WE’RE OKAY. And I carry her into the sunlight, and we start walking down the sidewalk together, holding hands, free.

  When I told Norm, my eyes teared up. “I just carried her right out.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Norm. “It’s exactly how you have to approach yourself when you panic, by separating the child from the adult. Then you can have compassion for little Rita, and you can help her feel safe.”

  On my way home, I stopped at Walden Pond. I’d been passing it for weeks before and after my sessions with Norm, and each time I had the urge to walk down to it. Everything was thawing: the ice in the pond had been melting, breaking apart into small white islands. I was aware of how fast life is—how one minute we’re children with all our strange dreams, and the next minute we’re reaching back, like a person pulled out to sea by a tide. You never expect all that distance. You never expect to get so far so fast.

&nb
sp; I’d learned a lot in the past months—about panic and about myself—but I’d also lost a lot. I’d lost the summer, fall, and winter. I’d lost months of work. I’d lost my confidence. But every day was a chance to reclaim my footing in the world. Thoreau writes, There is no ill which may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. I could either be someone who kept driving past Walden Pond, or I could be someone who actually stopped and walked down the big hill to the water.

  When I got there, the pond’s melting ice was making a gentle hissing sound. I dipped my hands into the water, a cold bite, then started to walk. Snow and ice still lined large portions of the path, so I had to be careful not to slip, and as I ventured farther in, I felt a moment of unease over being alone. Only weeks earlier I had been anxious about walking to the edge of the azalea bushes in our yard; now I was going to walk almost two miles, on ice, in the middle of the woods, by myself. But I could hear the words of Emerson, as if he were right there speaking them to me: Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string. So I walked, and the lake whispered, and my feet crunched through the snow, and everything around me seemed perfectly impermanent, and I realized how all we ever get—the only guarantee we really have—is this moment. So I surrendered to it. I kept walking.

  When I arrived home that afternoon, I began cleaning. I put new sheets on the bed and fluffed the pillows mightily, then misted them with rose water. I scrubbed the floors and polished every faucet. I swept the front steps and the walk. I threw away old magazines and placed a cobalt bowl filled with lemons on the kitchen counter. I burned sage, winding the smoke through each room in the house. Then I walked into my office with purpose and stopped at my desk. There, beside a notebook with a lotus flower on the cover, lay my panic button, its chain streaming out beside it like a wavy flag. I scooped it up and took it back to the drawer where I found it. “Thank you,” I said.

  FORTY-SIX

  I’m learning that boys, like men, are always watching girls. But it’s different with boys—sweeter. So I flirt with all of them, and soon my name shows up inside hearts on several more notebooks. John, Dallas’s brainy friend, writes Lovely Rita on his. For years, my parents called me terrible names. But now, in black ink, I am lovely. “I don’t care,” Dallas says smiling, pointing to John’s notebook and tousling his hair—“He can write whatever he wants. I know you love me.” And I do. At fifteen, this is the most normal my life has ever felt. And every time Dallas smiles at me, I heal a little.

  I cheer for Dallas on the baseball field, and he claps for me when I bowl a strike (or more often, a gutter ball) during one of our unit’s weekly outings. We gaze at each other across the room. We draw each other’s names in bubble letters and hang them on our walls. We take Polaroids of ourselves and give them to each other, as if we’re giving ourselves. Here, we keep saying, I’m yours.

  Mr. Ware stares at me intently, leaning forward with his hands cupping his knees. A month has passed since I first arrived at the Jackson Unit. “So, you really like getting that attention from the boys, don’t you?” he asks, though it’s more of a statement.

  “I don’t know.” I feel myself blush and look away.

  “Bullshit, Rita. You know exactly what I mean.” He pulls his chair closer to me. “I mean, c’mon, anyone can see how you play them. And it works—you’ve got them all drooling. So now the question is why?”

  I tap my foot nervously. “I don’t know.” Here, for the first time, someone is exposing me, and I don’t like it—not even from Mr. Ware.

  “C’mon, you’re smarter than that. What do you think?”

  “Maybe because I just want to feel pretty.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of what’s underneath. You present this façade—as if who you are without the makeup and the tight Harley shirt won’t be good enough.”

  I chew on the tip of my finger. “What if I don’t know who I am?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. We’re going to start focusing on the inside. You think Dallas loves you? Dallas doesn’t know you—and how can he if you don’t know yourself? What Dallas loves is an idea of you. And that’s not bad. It’s just not love.”

  “What if nobody loves me?” I barely whisper.

  “I do.” He pulls a book from the shelves and swings his chair around beside me. The book is white. On it is a pencil drawing of a little circle with an eye and a pie-shaped mouth. He opens the book and begins to read: “It was a missing piece. And it was not happy . . .”

  In the dark, Tina and I keep whispering. She tells me about her family, about drugs, about things I promise to keep secret. “Tell me more about what it was like to be a runaway,” she says.

  I turn over on my stomach and lean on my elbows, resting my face in my hands. I’ve never talked to anyone like this. “What do you want to know?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Different places. I just met people, and they let me stay with them sometimes.” I don’t tell her about Duwahi and Karen, though sometimes they still find me in my dreams.

  “What did you do when you didn’t have a place to stay?”

  “I slept on staircases. And sometimes in empty cars. And once on a bus. And once I snuck into my father’s yard when he was in prison and slept on a lounge chair.”

  “What was it like? Out there at night?”

  I close my eyes and think. “It’s strange, but it stopped being scary. I mean, when I was with my parents, I was always afraid, especially at night. I had a lot of nightmares, and even when I woke up, it felt like I was still in them. But when I was on the run, it changed. People were scary sometimes, but nighttime, it was—I don’t know—possible.” I turn over again to lie on my back. “Kind of like now.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Like now.”

  “You know, the stars—I think they listen.”

  “Do you think they’re listening now?”

  “I think they’re always listening.”

  We’re quiet for several minutes, and I wonder if Tina has fallen asleep. Then I hear her get out of bed. Without a word, she comes across the room in the dark and sits down next to me. Her hip presses against mine. She leans forward, so close I can feel her breath on my lips, and at that moment, the thing I want most in the world is for her to kiss me.

  But she doesn’t. Instead, she lingers there, then gets up and goes back to her bed. In the silence, we breathe darkness. It’s as if she and I own it, the darkness, together.

  We have some free time before an N.A. meeting, so I go outside. Dallas is leaving tomorrow; he’s going home. Right now I’m the only one out here. The sun has slipped behind a mountain and lit the sky in mauve, tangerine, sienna—a warm blanket lowering itself into every crevice. I sit on the grass in the middle of a hill and watch the sky drop in layers. At the top, a sapphire sheet deepens, starts spreading down. The buzz of insects is as steady as stillness. The air is electric, a charge to my skin. In this moment there is nothing but mountains and the swirling atmosphere and the invisible stars poised behind it all. There is no distinction between the air and the buzz and the mountains and me: we all flow into each other.

  The next morning, before Dallas leaves, the staff finally lets us have the embrace we’ve been waiting two months for. His hug is softer than I expected, and he smells like soap and sun and salt. Everyone has crowded around us, as if they’re rooting for us. We’re like the rehab version of prom king and queen. “When you get out, I’m comin’ for you,” he whispers in my ear. I am crying, in part because I’m going to miss him, and in part because I’ve already learned the mileage of these kinds of vows.

  “So, how are you going to keep yourself clean when you’re home, and your mother’s pissing you off, let’s say, and the thought of getting high starts to sound pretty damn good all of a sudden?”

  Behind Mr. Ware’s head hangs a picture I made for him: a roa
d starting in a dark slug-ridden pit and ending in a rainbow that arches right off the page. I wanted it to represent my journey—how the road before had been mostly dark, and how coming there, to him, to the Jackson Unit, to the mountains, to myself, I’d found light. It isn’t a particularly good drawing, but it was the best I could do.

  I give the answers I’ve been taught, and though I love Mr. Ware, it’s something of a performance: “Well, for one, I’m not going to engage in magical thinking, and if things get tough, I’m going to keep myself off the pity pot. I’m going to pray and definitely avoid people who use drugs. I’ll go to an N.A. meeting every day, and I’ll get a sponsor I can call for support. I’ll think before I speak or do something I might regret, and I’ll find hobbies and fill my time with things like writing and going on picnics and taking walks.” It’s not so much that I’m being dishonest as it is that I don’t really understand what I’m saying. These words have been repeated so much that they’ve lost their meaning. They’re flat. But even if they had a shape, I wouldn’t know how to fit them into the mystery of my future. I haven’t lived with my mother since I was nine, and I haven’t lived freely for years. I don’t know my sister anymore, aside from the occasional letters we send each other, and I don’t know where my father is. So a picnic with my family is a fantasy. Each time I think of it, all I can see is the ground, and a blanket, empty.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  At Norm’s, we were working on my fear of highways. “They’re too fast,” I explained. “And too big, and too hard.”

  “Too hard?”

  “Yes. Too much concrete and metal. And tunnels and bridges—they’re just evil.”

  “But you used to drive on the highway fine?”

  “I used to drive on any highway, anywhere—and usually in the fast lane.”