Don't need a sword to cut through flowers...

I quit taking the steroids last night because believe it or not, I came to the conclusion that the physical pain was easier to deal with than the panic attacks. I did what I could: last night after blogging I took half an Ambien and ended up getting a decent night's sleep. At work today I felt another panic attack coming on, so I took half a xanax and warded it off. I hate that I'm fighting the side effects of one pill with several others, but as the late John Lennon wisely sang, whatever gets you through the night, it's alright.

Last week my therapist told me I should try to do some good things for myself, so I spent a whopping $146 today on two new dresses and two pairs of shoes to wear to services on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. True, I am focusing on exactly the wrong elements of Elul; I should be looking inward and repenting and reflecting, but for some odd reason I am looking outward at my appearance and trying to be a little more aware of bringing what beauty I have to the surface by dressing better, wearing makeup again, feeling more confident, making the most of what I have because it beats dwelling on the pain and the yuck and the sad.

Besides, on a practical level, I can't wear slacks for my cantorial soloist gig, and I do want to look somewhat pretty on the days of awe, even though I know I can't hold a candle to most of the women in my congregation. So I did some online shopping today and bought a chocolate-brown wrap dress (which I would love to pair with some high leather boots, but I'm thinking that's pretty much a bad scene for Yom Kippur morning) and a little black A-line dress with satin accents on the sleeves and hem. If it looks OK, I'll wear it for Kol Nidre. If it looks like crap, it goes right back to the fat chick store.

So today was a better day for a number of reasons: a decision to blow off a project until Monday (it'll keep), the retail therapy, a beautiful service this evening at temple...I do feel better, but I'm not there yet. I feel the pain creeping back in because the medicine is transitioning out, but I'll cross that bridge when I have to. In the meantime, I think sleep would help more than anything.

Shabbat shalom.

Flare

It felt like a miracle this morning when I woke up: I could walk. This was not the case yesterday. When my clock radio went off, the pain was not only still there, it had intensified overnight, so that when my left foot hit the floor it felt like I'd been doing 85 MPH, Fred Flintstone-style, cross country. As if someone had dipped a fine gauge wire in gasoline, threaded it through my left leg, up to my lower back, and then set it on fire.

This is RA, folks. Unpredictable and excruciating. Most days, I'm not like this. But on the days I am, I have no idea how I'm going to get through it. I'm cranky, snappish, in a bad mood, because I can't even figure out how to walk the twenty steps from my office to the coffee machine or the manage two minute walk to my car from my apartment or get up the steps in my building -- I can't figure out how I'm going to get through the day without being in pain every single minute, pretty much unable to focus on anything else.

I limp from my apartment door to the elevator, ease myself down the steps one by one, holding on to the wall and the rails. I rest on the way to my car. When things get as bad as they were yesterday, I use the silver crutches that I keep in my bedroom closet. They help a lot. But when I'm like this, I can't get my own coffee. Or water. Or lunch. If I want to go to the ladies' room, I have to plan accordingly - devise the trip when hopefully no one will see me limping or using crutches, so I don't have to answer the questions, "What did you do to yourself? Are you OK?" or worse, have my colleagues look at me as if they know I'm not good enough or strong enough to be doing my job, that I'm unreliable, weak, and can't be trusted to handle my clients or projects.

Accordingly, I started the emergency Medrol pack. This is the only thing that helps me. Its side effects are legion. It drives blood sugar through the roof, and in my Type 2 diabetic current situation, I've got all the symptoms back - dry mouth, light-headedness, and the overwhelming need to consume, let's see: I'm on my fourth liter of water right now. The steroids also contribute to severe panic attacks like the one I had this morning, and the one I am trying to stave off right now by blogging, because hell knows, I won't be sleeping anytime soon. I can choose anything I'm anxious about: love, money, the novel I've written, Selichot, the friend I haven't seen in four weeks, my old job, the friend who got laid off this week (thanks, Lehman), my current job, the client who's pissing me off, the novel I haven't written, the friend I haven't seen in ten years, the focus group I have to pull out of my butt by tomorrow at 3PM, my retirement account, the High Holidays, the students I taught tonight who are struggling with family and religious and identity issues, the novel I want to write, the El Maleh Rachamim melody I have to learn by Yom Kippur - and the steroids help me to blow it up into another hurricane system sweeping the confines of my brain. And like Texas, New Orleans, etc., there's nothing I can do. Because the land itself cannot evacuate.

I know I'm sounding a little insane right now. That's okay: I'm feeling a little insane right now. So worried and yet, on Metro North earlier this evening, I know there are people with more worries than me. I know there are so many people struggling this week: afraid, with families, worried that it's all going to blow up in their faces, that their houses made of (credit) cards will fall. My company booked $156K of business this week: I do not have to worry like other people. My job is secure - more secure than it ever was in the Jewish world. I do good work and I try to do good works when I can. But I am so scared right now, scared that this pain situation is going to be forever and the only cure is driving me into this state of anxiety that's almost worse than being unable to function physically. What is the better trade-off?

Tonight as I was waiting for the train at Larchmont I was watching the headlights of the train move forward down the track - and almost so afraid to even admit this - I felt that I could understand the compulsion to jump on to the tracks. I would never do it, but I could understand the seduction of that moment, to be free of the worry and the anxiety, to be free of all this medication and these side effects, of these diseases and their dark roads forward. The endless hours of having to deal with meaningless tasks, the gym and the office and the constant wishing I was doing something that was life-affirming, that was helping someone, helping the world be better, instead of just being some stupid rat on a treadmill. But I stepped back from the yellow line, because if nothing else, Torah demands that I choose life. And being given the gift, the miracle of being able to walk this morning, was not meant for me to walk in that unspeakable direction.

In three weeks I have to chant my favorite words from the Torah...This mitzvah that I command you this day is not too distant, nor too difficult; it is not in the heavens nor across the seas, so that someone should bring it back to you so you can do it - no, it is very near to you, in your heart and in your mouth, and you can do it.

I know I can chant it. I just hope I can mean it.

Not Fade Away

Many people far more articulate than I am have offered their reflections today, ranging from the world stage to the deeply personal, but as a witness to the events that took place seven years ago, I feel somewhat compelled to offer my own. It's an odd balance: it's a day when I appreciate being just another New Yorker who was downtown that morning, but it's also still true that the memory of that morning still exists in painful, singular detail; as universal and allegedly unifying as the day remains, it's also true everyone has their own experience of it. It's exactly the way one of my friends put it: the memory divides people into us and them - those who watched it go down in the safety of their homes and offices, and those of us who were right there, who had the story even before the networks did.

Like most people who were downtown that morning, I can recall, minute by minute, every step, every breath, every expression of disbelief: even the long, painfully endured vision of standing in my old conference room during those few minutes between the first plane and the second, when we still thought it was just a terrible accident. I was alone, staring out the window, my shock-addled brain bouncing from thought to thought: How will they ever fix the damage? There are people who are dying, right now, before my eyes. I am dreaming this. This isn't really happening.

I cried most of the way to work today, safe, in my basically armored vehicle, alone with my radio and my thoughts, alone with Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and the moments of silence. My thoughts moved from that morning in the conference room to the moments of now: Abby lighting the yahrzeit candle in the Museum lobby, Audrey with her new baby, Connor in his 3rd grade classroom, Ellen still asleep in California. I wondered if there were any other people crying in their cars. I wondered if there were people crying on the subway and Metro North.

I no longer take the subway to work, no longer trace my steps downtown each morning with a sense of fear and dread, that today will be the day, that this train will be the one, that the guardsman standing in front of the florist in Grand Central can't really help if something goes wrong; that his job will be recovery, not rescue.

But there wasn't really any safety from today's sadness. This year it is hitting much harder for some reason that I can't quite figure out, nor do I have the energy to try. Even in Westchester, a place I consider inhabited mostly by "them" (those who watched it on TV), everywhere I've been today, I've heard and overheard conversations I didn't expect to hear: a woman's voice drifts out of her open car door, saying: "They didn't know I was alive. I tried and tried calling, but all the cell phones were down." Two colleagues smoking in front of our building's doors: "It wasn't like Mother Nature got angry. It wasn't an act of G-d." "3,000 people dead and we're no safer now than we were that morning. Probably less safe now, actually. What does it all mean? What was it all for?"

I thought about having a pumpernickel bagel for breakfast this morning. I happened to stop at Zaro's in Grand Central that morning for one, but they were all out. In a typical entitled New Yorker snit, I bitched out the girl behind the counter before settling for onion. A few weeks later, afflicted with the fever of kindness that had descended upon the city when I returned to work, I apologized. She looked at me like I had three heads. The onion one was still in its wax-paper wrapper on my desk when I got back to my office, covered in a fine layer of buttery grease and grayish dust.

I'm used to the skyline now. When I came back from Delaware this weekend I didn't feel the sadness and shock of not seeing the towers, all through college my first sign of home, the signal that I had only about 45 minutes to go before pulling in my driveway. For all the years of college and grad school they were the sign that I had escaped - from tough classes, from idiot boyfriends, from the fear that nothing was going the way it was supposed to; the skyline's message was that it didn't matter - I would be home soon, and someone would take care of me. But coming back this weekend, I realized that none of that is true anymore, so I just took the exit for the bridge and kept going.

And yet, for all of the painful memories of that morning, when I close my eyes I can still remember that summer Saturday in 1976, the ride into the city with the bicentennial star everywhere, even on the fire hydrants, and my dad's hand in mine as we stepped off the elevator and made our way through the glass doors to the rooftop, snaked with cables and wires and equipment, a place where most people weren't allowed to go, but where we had special access.

It was before I had ever been on an airplane, before I learned how to be afraid of heights. Together we walked the perimeter of the rooftop and looked all around, at the bridges strung across the East River, at the flat, industrial plain of New Jersey across the Hudson, at the companion rooftop of the south tower looming comfortingly close by.

My dad had just solved his first big case in the towers and I remember how the other officers greeted him like a hero. But more than that, I remember the city that he showed me that afternoon, as we looked from the top of the north tower and he pointed out landmarks and buildings and streets as if they were gifts he was giving to me, as if it was a kingdom that I would inherit, a place that would belong to me the way it belonged to him, someday.