20/40
On 9/11/2001, I was five days away from my 20th birthday. I worked at 4 World Trade Center on the ground floor waiting tables, and went to school at Pace University which was just a few blocks away. The remains of two of the victims were just identified this month, and there are still over a thousand victims whose remains have not yet been found. We are unsure of the actual death toll, since people have been dying of 9/11 related cancers and by suicide since. There is no end in sight.
Twenty years later, I am turning 40, in the middle of a global pandemic that has lasted eighteen months and killed more than 30,000 New Yorkers. I live in Queens, which was the epicenter of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no end in sight.
I wish I had something profound to say about these twenty years. I wish I could tell you that I learned a lot, about myself and the world, and have a better idea of why and how things are. I do not. I am not here to offer false platitudes. I know less than ever. I struggle with writing lately, with putting my thoughts together. I think about that cloudless September day in 2001, and the mood I was in that morning — a rare good one. I think about how I hunkered down in Brooklyn with bottles of warm chardonnay, alone, terrified that my friends and colleagues were dead. I think about that girl, and how traumatized she already was, and how deep that trauma went. Then I think about the day in March 2020 when we got the stay at home orders, the terrifying death toll in the city, then the horrors of April when my husband got COVID and I was faced with the possibility of losing him. I think of these two women — one so very young, one now middle aged — and I try to reconcile what I thought I knew then with what I know now.
The truth of the matter is that my worldview over the past several years has been utterly rocked. I watched the rise of Trump in horror as worst fear after worst fear came true over and over again, most recently when the Supreme Court all but overturned Roe v. Wade in the wee hours of the night. The world just became a worse place for pregnant people, as if that weren’t hard enough already. The pandemic rages on, and instead of getting vaccinated, there are people currently trying to cure/prevent COVID with horse dewormer. I live in a world I no longer understand, at all. I used to think people were generally good. I am not sure of that anymore.
When it comes down to it, the truth is that I am so intensely angry I am not sure what to do with myself. I am afraid of my own rage. There was a lot of verbal abuse when I was growing up, and sometimes physical violence. Anger was my family’s first language. As a result, I come off as a reactionary hot head sometimes, but people closest to me would certainly say that I’m not some raging lunatic who flies off the handle. It is very rare that I lose my temper, because I do not trust it. I was raised to cut you with my words. I became very good at it. I realized early on that this was not a way to make or keep friends, relationships, or jobs. So, I learned how to be mean to myself instead. Being mean to myself felt safer, familiar, comfortable. I’ve spent the last decade in therapy unraveling all of this, thread by thread. I started with a giant ball of yarn and now I’ve just got some super tangly bits at the end. But anger is still hard for me.
I am trying to write instead of doing battle with myself, but I am angry about the last 20 years. I am angry that I spent my 20s recovering from the PTSD of 9/11 on top of PTSD from my childhood. I am angry that I live with this strange survivor’s guilt because if I’d left my house fifteen minutes earlier I would have been in the basement of the World Trade Center. I am angry at the terrorists, but I’m also angry that we got into a war we never should have gotten into. I am angry that we had eight miserable years of George W. Bush, which culminated in the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. I am angry that Fox News became the propaganda arm of the GOP and brainwashed our parents and grandparents. I am angry that Barack Obama did not fight harder for his Supreme Court justice. I am angry at Donald Trump for a multitude of reasons, but more angry at those who enabled him. I am angry at Mitch McConnell. I am angry at misogynists in socialist clothing. I am angry at the men who dare legislate my body. I am angry at my fellow Americans, who after watching people die in spectacular fashion on national TV, took it upon themselves to project their own racism and xenophobia onto a tragedy that did not happen to them, and who then made something that should have been a solemn day of reflection into a day of nationalism and faux patriotism. I am angry at the terrorists again — but this time it’s the white supremacists, the mass shooters, the ones who stormed the Capitol. I am angry that a too large percentage of us are selfishly, flagrantly, and sometimes maliciously doing everything they can to ensure that this pandemic may never ever end.
How do you deal with this much? Where do you begin? How do I write about this? The enormity of it. The trauma of it. The violence of it. And I am one of the lucky ones. One of the luckiest ones. I am white, cisgendered, educated, married, housed, employed and fed. If I am this angry, I cannot imagine what others are burdened with right now. My anger does not matter to this world. I do not expect it to. I just wonder what we’re all supposed to do with it now, but I know I can’t turn on myself, either. That isn’t serving me anymore. I am not sure that it ever did.
At 20, I was isolated, uncertain, and traumatized. I was socially awkward, and I alienated people because I didn’t want to let anyone get too close. I went through a lot of different friend groups, and didn’t seem to find myself anchored anywhere. At 40, I have a cadre of incredible friends, acquaintances, and family (both chosen and blood). I surround myself with kind, empathetic, and generous people. 9/11 felt like the end of something. It was for certain the end of my innocence, whatever was left of it. I look back on that girl in an unusually good mood, heading to the subway, on her way to pick up her paycheck at 4 World Trade. She didn’t see the plumes of smoke until she exited the train station, right around the time they suspended service. I look into her horrified face and I want to tell her it will all have been worth it, that the experience will change her in ways good and bad, but I’m not sure that’s exactly right. What I really want to tell my 20 year old self is that twenty years from now, she will be loved and she will be relatively safe. That she is lucky. That we survived.
On my way to work this morning, I got off the subway, pulled down my mask, and looked to the sky. It was clear, blue, and nearly cloudless. The light is beginning to shift in that September way. The days are growing shorter. I looked up to the Chrysler Building bathed in warm, early autumn light, and then shifted my view to the rest of the skyline. I looked downtown where the big twins once stood, blocking out the light on Rector Street. I was flooded with memory, with sadness, with gratitude. I may be angry. I may be sad. I may be getting older. I may not understand the world I live in, but I’m still in it. I’m still in New York City, a place I never stopped loving even when it did the most to get me to stop. Our claim to the tragedy of that day was taken from us. It is time for us to reclaim it. This city now deserves the chance to grieve our dead, to process this trauma, and to heal as much as we can. 9/11 cannot belong to America anymore. The grief is ours to bear now.
While anger can be useful, it is only one stage of grief. It cannot be a state of permanence. We must work towards acceptance. Towards whatever peace we can make with it all. I will think about how I can help create the world I want to live in. I will hold space for those who have lost people to racial and social injustice. I will sit and silently grieve for every light that was snuffed out in my city, both twenty years ago and now. I will hold compassion and grace for that young woman who stepped out of her apartment one September morning into a forever changed world, and forgiveness and patience for the me who is trying to live in it.
