When Worlds Change
Where I was on 9/11, and where I am on 9/11 now
Twenty-four years ago today, I was supposed to be starting my first day of graduate school classes.
Four years ago today, I wrote this:
20 years ago I had just moved to New York. Just moved. So I didn't even have television, I didn't have internet, I had nothing to orient me when my phone started ringing that morning and people who loved me kept calling, waking me up, asking if I was okay, asking if I knew what had happened.
I remember a lot of things about that day, but one thing that occurs to me so many years later is how disorienting it was. How I heard the news over and over again from John, from my parents, from my uncles, over and over, and it felt like I still didn't quite know what was happening. I got dressed and I went in search of a place with a TV and I still didn't quite get it. I watched, but I didn't get it. I went to my grad school campus and everyone was talking about it and I didn't get it. I saw smoke in the skyline and I could not understand. It felt like what happens when you read a book and your mind wanders, and suddenly you realize that you've read the same sentence four or five times over but you still don't know what it says.
I spent the whole day reading the lines of what had happened, and I still didn't know what it meant. So much horror, but I tried and tried to understand it and it still felt like some sort of foreign language. I could not grasp onto anything.
The other thing that I remember on this 20th anniversary, that hardly anyone talks about when they say #neverforget, is how my classmate was assaulted on the subway a day or two after. Sure, Americans were "united" on 9/12, but maybe not all the way. Not enough to stop a young man with brown skin from being attacked as a possible terrorist. His family was from India. He was born and raised here. He was American. But who was going to stop to ask?
I remember a lot, a lot more. Some good and some terrible. Some frightening and some uplifting. Like all tragedies, 20 years ago today, events called us to show both our highest self and our basest instincts. When I think about never forgetting I wonder what it is, exactly, that we want to make sure people don't forget, and what meaning we want to remain. And I'm wrestling with that, back in that place of feeling like I'm reading and reading and not comprehending. I don't know if I ever will.
That disorientation, the sense of being somehow disembodied, disconnected from my rational brain, is eerily familiar this morning as I process yet another moment where I am absolutely certain that the world has just changed in ways I cannot possibly predict or discern. Yesterday in America was a horrible, train-wreck nightmare of a day, and at the risk of being utterly macabre in my chosen imagery, I can only think of it as the kind of day where if our nation were an emergency room, triage would have been impossible to accomplish because so many things started bleeding all at once that it was hard to even keep up with the news, much less do anything about it. It was a day where it felt like alarms were going off continually and we were left spinning in circles, trying to decipher which was most urgent, unable to act, only able to react.
And today is the anniversary of 9/11, which made me realize that I have had this exact kind of day before, and it was the demarcation line between my childhood and my adulthood. The break between an America that felt safe and trusting and one that felt edgy and suspicious. The moment where I knew we were never going to be who we were again.
My elder son is at college now for his first year. He texted me last night: “I’ve been busy today, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m aware of all the political division and tragedy going on today and I don’t even know how to react.”
This is the demarcation line between his childhood and his adulthood. I know it and I think he knows it, too. This is a moment where the world, which was already heaving and shuddering and threatening to crack under our feet, has finally given way. A fault line has appeared. I can hear the snap of the bone, the finality of this moment. Straws and camels.
I think last night was the first night I really felt fear. Fear for our world, fear for our nation, fear for our communities, fear for my family and my friends and myself. It crept up on me over the course of the evening and sprang upon me while I lay in bed trying to sleep.
It’s gone now.
When it came as an unwanted visitor, my first instinct was to struggle with it. I didn’t want it there, after all. But struggle is exhausting, and I knew that this particular fight was one I was unlikely to win. So I invited the fear in, and I thanked it. I said to it, Hello, friend. Thank you for showing up to see me. Thank you for coming to try to warn me or save me. I know you’re trying to help.
And I felt it settle — sit within me and find a cautious comfort — and I observed it for a while. All the what-ifs and doomsday predictions it carried. All the grief and pain and anger it foreshadowed. I looked at Fear and remembered that Fear is always made bigger by our preemptive dissolution of joy. It feeds on our willingness to surrender what is to what might be. Fear takes a terrible event and uses it to alter our consciousness before the world has even had a chance to change around us; it uses our reaction to make everything more catastrophic in an instant.
I looked at Fear and I did not offer it my reaction. I did not offer it my struggle. I did not offer it anything but a space to sit, for a while, and my recognition that I could feed it or starve it, co-create it or let it remain unadorned. And after a while Fear decided to leave and seek attention elsewhere, and I — shockingly, almost incomprehensibly — slept peacefully the whole night through.
My first thoughts on waking were tender, like bruises. I knew yesterday had happened. I knew today awaited — a day filled with the echoes of 24-year-old memories, a day when the world will have changed again, a day of reckoning and reckoning and reckoning to come. But also a day I can face knowing that Fear does not have to live it alongside me.
I do not understand the world. I did not understand it all those years ago, and I have not understood it better since, and I continue to not understand it now. I do not know what this snapping of the back of a camel somewhere in the cosmos means and I do not know how my life, or my children’s lives, or my nation’s life, will change today or tomorrow or in all the tomorrows to come. I do not understand the world but at least I understand now that feeding an unwelcome houseguest is the surest way to make it stay. I do not have to spread my life, my joy, my plans, my resilience, my being on toast and feed it to something I didn’t invite in the first place.
Twenty-four years ago the world changed and yesterday the world changed and in the midst of all this changing, we don’t have to become changed. We can remain soft and tender and steadfast and resolute and loving and giving and creative and thoughtful and we can eat food and make plans and do good works and be good humans, in spite of the world, in spite of the mess, within the world and within the mess. That’s maybe the only thing I do understand after all this time and it’s not a lot, but it helps me sleep at night. And maybe it’ll help you, too.
What do you understand about the world right now? Help me understand it, too.
Beautiful.