I was just 12 years old, in my first period class at middle school I.S.89, two blocks from the World Trade Center, when the planes hit. It was the second day of school. We were 10 minutes into a lesson on biomes and ecosystems when we heard a deafening boom. It was 8:46 a.m.
The impact was so strong that it knocked some of us off of our stools. Shelves rattled, and everyone looked at each other in panic.
Rebecca Segarra, then 12, saw the first plane crash into the North Tower on her way to the girls’ bathroom. Thirteen-year-old Jaclyn Kopel’s math class took place in the only occupied classroom facing the Towers, and she saw people hanging out of the windows, waving white shirts.
Soon our class joined the rest of the school in the cafeteria, and we were told not to leave the building under any circumstances.
My friend Dylan was listening to the radio on his Discman.
“They said that a plane hit the building,” he said. Several minutes later, the bomb squad burst through the front doors of the building. Dylan made another announcement, but only a few of us heard it.
“A second plane just hit the other Tower.”
Parents began rushing into the building, frantic, saying, “The buildings are on fire, and a second plane has hit!”
My neighbor, Ann Chawalko, and her 13-year-old son, Charles, appeared in the doorway of the school cafeteria at the same time that the bomb squad rushed in. She was bringing Charles in late from a dentist appointment. My father worked in Staten Island, my mother, uptown. I begged her to take me with her before the school evacuated up the West Side Highway. We left just minutes before the first Tower fell.
On his way home, Richard Reitzfeld, then 12, saw a man dangling off the tail of the plane lodged into a Tower, and people falling off the sides. We heard the sickening thud of bodies hitting cars.
Rebecca, her father and six other kids ran up the highway — but he soon began to keel over. “I don’t think I’m going to make it,” he wheezed. Suddenly, they saw a cloud of smoke coming down from the sky. ”Daddy, you have to!” she shouted as she pulled him up. “The cloud is coming! Run!”
From their Greenwich Street apartment several blocks away, Richard watched as more people jumped and hit the ground. When the first tower fell, his home shook, and he ran onto his bed and curled up into a ball. “I don’t want to die,” he said to himself over and over, rocking back and forth.
I’ve never gotten over it — and neither have many of my classmates.
Some turned to alcohol and drugs to numb or escape their pain. Some became shut-ins who spoke to no one and never left their apartments. Some became zealots, picking fights with everyone. Everyone’s shattered sense of safety led them to extremes. Among this small group — roughly 300 kids, grades 6 through 8 — few of those I know have walked away unscathed.
All of us lived on thin ice, waiting for the next attack, prepared at any moment. Everything from that day forward was a matter of life or death. Catastrophic thinking sent me into frenzied states, and I was so afraid of feeling sad and anxious that I panicked at the first signs of feeling that way. I became paralyzed by depression and couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. I had panic attacks on the subway when the train stopped in the tunnel. I stared for hours at the Brooklyn Bridge down the street, just waiting for another attack. If I found myself in a crowd, I began to hyperventilate. My moods constantly shifted without warning. I was perpetually anxious, hypersensitive and highly emotionally reactive, looking for the next threat to my life or my well-being.
Therapists and doctors medicated me for a series of incorrect diagnoses that were later retracted, among them, bipolar disorder, our modern-day catchall. I went through at least 12 medications that made me sick to my stomach but yielded no results.
We were lucky enough not to lose loved ones, but we lost everything else — our childhoods, our sleep, our sanity.
Richard Reitzfeld began to spiral out of control, and his parents insisted he see a therapist four days a week after school instead of playing sports and hanging out with his friends, further angering and isolating him. He did not believe anyone could understand what he was going through if they were not there on that day, and refused to engage in conversation with his therapist, staring him down at most sessions and sometimes blowing therapy off entirely for seven years. By the time he got to college at George Washington University, he realized he could not bear to be alone with his thoughts. Depressed and feeling hopeless about his future, he thought about suicide whenever he was alone. His saving grace came junior year when he started taking psychology classes on a whim. He began to recognize some of his more complex symptoms, and it offered new hope.
He will soon attend graduate school, studying to become an adolescent psychiatrist.
“Feeling like I didn’t have anyone I could safely talk to was absolute torture,” he said. “Nobody should ever have to go through life like that.”
His own struggle, however, is far from over.
“I never felt safe again after that day, not for a single day of my life,” Richard said.
Neither did Charles Chawalko. That night and for the next two years, he prayed before going to sleep that he would not die, believing 9/11 was just the beginning. He became obsessed with the government, world news, nuclear weapons and conspiracy theories, compulsively searching the Internet. He immediately developed sleep paralysis, a disorder that kept him awake while his body shut down for REM sleep, panicking in response to vivid hallucinations — most often, that nuclear bombs were going off outside his window and throughout the city.
He began to experience a strong dissociation between himself and the surreal reality that was now his world — his ability to function, his memory, and his perception were completely disrupted. He felt as though he was watching himself act without having control over the situation and soon developed an uncontrollable aggression towards others, lashing out and wrestling friends to the ground with more frequency and intensity than they could stand.
Charles could not separate from his family to go away to college and enrolled at Fordham University, where he majored in history and politics. He is currently looking for a job in local government doing urban planning, and aspires to one day run for office.
Now seeing a therapist, he doubts he will ever be able to recover from his chronic anxiety and his fears for the future.
“I’m still terrified of the underlying threat of another attack, undoubtedly nuclear. Homegrown terrorism is also a big threat, since there are people here who are against the government and may become terrorists,” he said. “But I’m trying to get more control over these unrelenting thoughts in therapy.”
Jaclyn Kopel lived in fear that her Wall Street neighborhood would soon be attacked and went to great lengths to avoid all potential targets — to this day, she won’t go near major city buildings. For years, whenever she saw a low-flying plane, she called her mother in a panic, hysterical until she saw it fly out of sight.
Immediately after 9/11, she became depressed and stopped going out with friends and stayed home in her room, clinging to her mother and avoiding social interaction. Jaclyn developed borderline asthma the following year. Soon it was clear that her immune system had been significantly compromised — every cold turned into a full-blown flu, multiple times a year. She, like so many others, became sick after inhaling toxic particulates on that day and in the months that followed. Jaclyn nearly died from penicillin poisoning two years ago and suffers from repeated cases of walking pneumonia and bronchitis. It still takes her at least three times as long to recover from her many ailments as a normal person would.
“I can’t seem to fight anything,” she said. “I have yet to find an antibiotic I’m not allergic to, and I’m afraid that one day I won’t recover at all.”
When the height of her depression hit in 12th grade, she found refuge during lunch and after school with her science teacher. She always had her door open and offered Jaclyn guidance others couldn’t.
Jaclyn is now a history teacher, with Islam a part of her curriculum — and considers ways to prevent future attacks.
“A lot of these kids think all Muslims are terrorists,” she said. “We have to break boundaries and make them more culturally aware. If the next generation has these [attitudes], other countries, especially Muslim countries, will hate us even more. It’s just going to provoke them. It will bring further conflict, we’ll never resolve anything and something liked 9/11 will happen again.”
Rebecca Segarra believes another 9/11 is coming at any moment, and has every day for over a decade. It keeps her up at night; she hasn’t slept for more than four hours every few days for the past 10 years. Her imagination is as vivid as her nightmares, in which she and others run for their lives as the city is attacked, people dropping dead around her. Suffering severe separation from her parents, she could not travel more than five blocks from her apartment alone until last year. She leaves the train anytime a policeman appears on the platform.
“I still think something terrible is going to happen all the time, every single day,” she said.
She is still unable to shake the feeling that someone is always watching her and will put her life in danger. In high school, her worst fear came true: A stalker began threatening to kill her. Too afraid to leave the house, she dropped out of high school four months before graduation. Rebecca and her mother currently work together as theater ushers on Broadway. She feels she is too anxious “to be able to do a good job at anything.”
“I could never go on an interview, I doubt myself too much and my nerves are always shot,” she said. “My dream is to be a fashion editor, but I put myself down too much to even try.”
At 22, I’ve since found a therapist who’s taught me to gain control over my fears and anxieties. She taught me new ways of thinking, perceiving and reacting, and I’ve finally gotten my life back after being stuck at age 12 for a decade. PTSD is lifelong, and I, like my former classmates, still live in fear of another attack, but that fear reminds me every day just how lucky I am to be alive.
This was a decade lost for us all, but we look forward to a better 10 years ahead.
Helaina Hovitz still lives in lower Manhattan and is working on a book about 9/11.