How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity
Letter from St. Thomas
April 2, 2018 Issue
How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity
Hannah Upp disappears for weeks at a time, forgetting her sense of self. Can she still be found?
By Rachel Aviv
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/how-a-young-woman-lost-her-identity
Hannah Upp had been missing for nearly two weeks when she was seen at the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan. Her friends, most of them her former classmates from Bryn Mawr, had posted a thousand flyers about her disappearance on signposts and at subway stations and bus stops. It was September, 2008, and Hannah, a middle-school teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public school in Harlem, hadn’t shown up for the first day of school. Her roommate had found her wallet, passport, MetroCard, and cell phone in her purse, on the floor of her bedroom. The News reported, “Teacher, 23, Disappears Into Thin Air.”
A detective asked Hannah’s mother, Barbara Bellus, to come to the Thirtieth Precinct, in Harlem, to view the Apple Store surveillance footage. Barbara watched a woman wearing a sports bra and running shorts, her brown hair pulled into a high ponytail, ascend the staircase in the store. A man stopped her and asked if she was the missing teacher in the news. Barbara said, “I could see her blow off what he was saying, and I knew instantly it was her—it was all her. She has this characteristic gesture. It’s, like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t you worry. You know me, I’m fine.’ ” Another camera had captured Hannah using one of the store’s laptops to log in to her Gmail account. She looked at the screen for a second before walking away.
The sighting was celebrated by Hannah’s friends, many of whom were camping out at her apartment. They made maps of the city’s parks, splitting them into quadrants, and sent groups to look in the woods and on running paths and under benches.
According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, which Hannah often referenced, she was an E.N.F.P.: Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving, a personality type that describes exuberant idealists looking for deeper meaning and connection. Five of her friends used the same phrase when describing her: “She lights up the room.” A friend told the News reporter, “Everyone you talk to is going to say she is their closest friend. She has no barriers. She was raised to trust and care for everyone, and she did.”
Two days after Hannah was seen at the Apple Store, she was spotted at a Starbucks in SoHo. By the time the police arrived, she had walked out the back door. The police recorded sightings of her at five New York Sports Clubs, all of them near midtown, where the detective on the case presumed she had gone to shower. In an article about her disappearance, the Times wrote, “It was as if the city had simply opened wide and swallowed her whole.”
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/02/how-a-young-woman-lost-her-identity