A Memoir in Pieces
10 months after 9/11, I packed a tape recorder, got in my car, and drove away from my entire life. I had no destination. Just questions I couldn't stop asking. I didn't know what I was running from. I just knew I had to go. New essay on the year everything fell apart. So when the school year ended, the road became my therapist.
I had just completed my first year of teaching high school, which started only two weeks before the historical attack on the twin towers.
In the months following September 11, I was—by my outward appearance—a 28-year-old woman living near Boston. Inside though, I was quietly unraveling. Like a wheel in the cog, I continued to function. I was teaching high school, maintaining friendships, keeping up appearances. All the while I was consumed by anxiety, estrangement, and a growing sense that I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged.
Chapter 1 of my self-published memoir, Finding My Way Home captures the voice of the then 28-year-old single woman.
When I realized that this is the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attack, I thought about my story, my experience both as a human being and a teacher. I left that profession 10 years ago.
At the time, my family offered little comfort. What I then saw as erratic behavior from my brother led me to distance myself from him. Years of accumulated conflict left me feeling equally as disconnected from my two sisters. Our shared history alone wasn't enough to hold us together. While I told myself that my friends were my chosen family, those friendships exposed a different wound: I was living beyond my means to keep up with people whose lives I envied, performing a version of myself that I didn’t much like or respect.
The 9/11 attacks didn't create these fractures, but they did illuminate them. Watching my students transform overnight into frightened nationalists, refusing to drive through tunnels or ride the subway, and lying awake near Logan Airport wondering if the worst is still to come, I began asking a question that forced me to look inward as much as outward: Why do they hate us? became Who am I?
A breakup and a pulled hamstring two weeks before the Boston Marathon were the final small indignities in a season of accumulating losses, and I decided to find out who was beneath the statistics of my life.
The second excerpt of Chapter 1 explains why I decided to take a solo road trip across the country in the summer of 2002. Yes, I got in my white Volkswagen Cabrio and drove away from everything familiar. Alone with a tape recorder and no fixed destination, I drove toward the only thing that has always offered me clarity—the open road.
Between now and September, I plan to release the memoir in experts. I’m even toying with a re-release in September. I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether having all the stories together in one bound book would be enjoyable.