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February, 1973
The Skokie Swift was an express train. Hell began when the doors shut, and I was trapped on that train for twenty minutes and unable to scream aloud, though in my mind, my scream had the same pitch and cadence as the squeal of the wheels on the tracks when we rounded a curve. While the train barreled out the northern tip of Chicago and into the suburbs with no stops in between, I was subject to the kind of anxiety that keeps some people from ever boarding a plane or an elevator in their lives—rising panic, choking fear. My heart palpitated. I heard it in my ears so loudly that I heard little else.
Other passengers looked out the windows or read their newspapers. Some closed their eyes and dozed. I stiffened as the train built up speed on its tracks. My personal roller coaster—the one in my mind—inched toward the peak of its incline, then pushed itself over the crest and swept downward, out of control. No escape! The Skokie Swift moved steadily, purposefully forward toward the northwest. It moved as swiftly as its name.
I did a freefall into a full-blown anxiety attack, and no one was waiting to catch me.
I looked ahead, not seeing. I clasped my hands together tightly, and I concentrated on not screaming. I never screamed. I never gave in to the temptation to run wildly down the aisle past shocked or indifferent passengers and hurl myself out the back door and onto the tracks. There was a deadly third rail on the tracks, and it would have ended my life swiftly. I often considered the irony of ending swiftly out the back of the swiftly moving Skokie Swift, then waded through the panic and groped for more alliteration to distract myself. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t scream. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. She sells seashells by the seashore. Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t scream…
This was my morning routine, like brushing my teeth. I always looked calm and self-possessed because I did this every morning. I would do it again in the evening, when I boarded the Skokie Swift to return home.
And when the train stopped and the panic receded, I took my place in the impatient, pressing crowd at the doors, which opened and through which we all spilled like spreading liquid onto the platform at the end of the deadly third rail. Once it was empty, the two-car Skokie Swift moved to the very end of the track, reversed direction, and scooted forward to receive a crowd from the other side of the platform. It then began its hellish ride back toward the city.
I walked the half mile to work, which was my life. The train-induced panic was parenthetical, morning and evening, with my life in between.
Dr. Silverman never helped with the panic attacks. I considered getting another job, and I considered not taking the train. However, if I had done either, the panic would have won, and I would have lost. I could have made my life smaller by avoiding the things that triggered panic, but then where would it have ended? I had panic attacks without warning. I had them on the train, and I had them when I wasn’t on it. If I thought for a moment about panic—if I merely thought, “What if I were to have a panic attack right now?”—I got one. Panic attacks were like a genie I could summon with a thought. So, if I had made my life smaller by eliminating the things that caused panic, or equated a place or a situation with panic and avoided it, I would have ended up in my apartment, crippled, unable to leave, and unable to pay the rent because I couldn’t work. If I panicked at home, then where would I have gone?
Panic was a badge of courage and freedom to me. It represented the imprisonment to which I could have succumbed if I had chosen, or if I weakened. So, I didn’t let it hinder me, and I never would. I simply gritted my teeth and didn’t scream while I waited for it to pass. I never died, I never exploded, and my health was intact. It was just terror, and I faced it because not facing it was not an option. Death was my only option, and I toyed with it, but I somehow kept forcing myself awake each day and onto the train, out of which I never, ever jumped.
I would not go the way my mother did, I vowed to myself. I would live to the end of my natural life, no matter what. My mother had always been held up to me as an object of contempt and scorn. I would not—will not—let whatever plagued her win over me as well. I would not be sneered at and trivialized in death as she was, and be dismissed as self-pitying or weak.
I was very familiar with the issues that plagued my mother. I inherited the gene, the brain chemistry, and the home life that triggered her depression. The difference is, I was made of sturdier stuff and was angry enough to live. Anger forced me out of bed and off to work when I otherwise would not have felt able to lift my head. It allowed me to shudder in mental and emotional agony, year after year, wanting nothing more than to die, but not taking my own life as she did.
So I did not stay in bed, and I did not gain possession of a gun. I woke up each day and went through hell to arrive at work. On the way, I did not scream. Then later I went home.
I did the best I could.
