The Days After
That Week
To be honest, the first couple of weeks were a total blur. I remember that I didn't sleep much. I remember that I watched TV obsessively. (Normally I don't watch TV at all -- I get only a few local channels, and will watch the occasional video or DVD.) The overload of images was horrifying, but I couldn't turn it off. If I turned it off, I knew I'd go right into denying that anything had happened, and somehow I didn't want to do that. It was too real.
I remember watching the news nonstop all week, every minute I was at home and awake. While I sat at my kitchen table watching my tiny TV, I frantically put together a puzzle depicting the wreck of the the Titanic. When I finally managed to tear myself away from the television, I read books on shipwrecks and disasters. The very first book I read was a graphic novel entitled The Watchmen, in which a former superhero decides to save a doomed and politically embattled Earth by inflicting upon it a disaster so large that the entire world is compelled to set aside their conflicts and deal with the situation as a unity of nations. I had nightmares about burning buildings.
I am not writing this because I feel like my experience of 9/11 is any more important than anyone else's. It's just mine. I'm putting this out there to the world for a lot of reasons. For one, I want it out of me (just like I wanted my abuse experiences out of me, and so wrote my abuse pages). For another reason, everybody in the nation was impacted by the attacks somehow; and if you read this and find you coped in ways similar to the way I did, just know that you weren't alone. And there are other reasons as well.
As time passed, I know I felt a lot of emotions. Shock, of course, was one of the first. Amazement. Sheer horror. A sickening, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Sorrow. An understanding that, as moved as I was (and still am), what I'm feeling is probably nothing like what the people who were on Manhattan island that day were feeling. I can't comprehend at all what it must have been like to have been at any of the Ground Zeroes. My compassion is limited. I am partly grateful for that, and partly frustrated by it.
I am glad I was not there, but I wish no one had to be.
After the initial shock -- indeed, along with it -- came an inordinate rage. Just this blind, screaming fury that someone could have done something like this, and did.
For me, within anger lies hope. I know that when I personally get angry, in that anger there lies two things: one, the sense that I'm worth something, and that I'm angry because I'm worth better than to be hurt; and two, a lot of very active energy that can be used to deal constructively with whatever has caused the anger.
I don't know about anybody else, but when I got angry, I knew somehow as a nation we'd deal with this. I knew that whoever had launched the attack didn't have the slightest fucking clue who they were dealing with -- yeah, America is spoiled and selfish in a lot of ways, but we also have a lot of spunk and fight in us (as well as the best military in the world). I knew we were going to find whoever had hit us, and annihilate them. I also knew the nation wasn't going to collapse. Yeah, the economic shockwave was going to be considerable, but it takes an awful lot to bring the wealthiest nation in the world down. And I knew we were going to rebuild something on the site of the World Trade Towers. New buildings, and hopefully, a memorial.
How could we not?