Twenty-Five Years Later: Reflections on 9/11
Warning: This post is about events surrounding 9/11, and therefore, might be upsetting or triggering to some readers.
It's hard to believe that twenty-five years have passed since September 11, 2001. I was fortunate in that I didn't lose anyone that day. I was also fortunate to have lived in NYC and to have been working at the RUSK Institute— a medical rehabilitation facility that's part of NYU Medical Center. My NYU badge, which identified me as a psychologist, gave me entrance into buildings and downtown neighborhoods that would have otherwise been off-limits in the days following 9/11.
Today, this feels like a gift. But back then, without the benefit of hindsight, I didn't know that I'd come out of it okay, and so I couldn't appreciate the gift. I, like so many of my fellow psychologists, absorbed the raw, intense experiences of people who were directly impacted by the 9/11 attacks. And I, like many New Yorkers, moved through 9/11 and its aftermath in fear and terror— unable to breathe, certain there would be more attacks, perpetually vigilant for signs of danger. I went to bed every night fully clothed, watch on wrist, socks and sneakers right next to my bed, prepared to escape quickly when the next wave of attacks, which I was certain would occur, hit our city.
Personal Reflection
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approached, I felt compelled to re-read my very detailed journal account of 9/11 and the two weeks that followed. Twenty-five years later, it's still hard to read and remember. My nervous system continues to hold the fear, sadness, and horror of that time. Reading through those journal entries caused my body to tense; I became tearful and had to remind myself to keep breathing. Twenty-five years later, I can still be brought back into it as if it was just yesterday.
Realizing this, I felt compelled to honor my own, personal 9/11 experience and to reflect on its impact on me all these years later. Since writing is my main method of reflecting and processing, I wrote about it again, but this time with the distance of 25 years behind me. I now feel compelled to put it out into the world, as a way to document that reality and to ensure it's not forgotten.
City Unknown
The streets of NYC were eerily quiet that day and in the days that followed, save for the wail of emergency vehicles and the rumble of trucks delivering equipment to what would become known as Ground Zero. The city felt unrecognizable. Periodically a military plane would fly overhead ("Wait, aren't all planes grounded?!"), and everyone would tense at the sound of a jet in the sky— something that, only days earlier, wouldn't have registered at all (over two decades later, I still sometimes feel a jolt of panic when I hear a plane overhead). From the Upper East Side, where I lived at that time, we could see— and smell— the black smoke rising from downtown: close, and yet a world away. People clustered together in restaurants, not to eat, but simply to be together, to not be alone.
A Kind and Loving NYC
We all loved one another. That's how it felt, anyway. I loved the construction workers at the building next door simply for their presence— they helped me feel less alone. We loved the NYPD, the FDNY, and the National Guardsmen who seemed to be everywhere. And oddly for us, they expressed their respect for us psychologists. There was a deep sense of mutual kindness and respect, even reverence, that feels distant today.
One night, after a long day of various volunteer gigs, a small group of fellow psychologists and I went to a Mexican restaurant and did tequila shots with the wait staff. We laughed and broke rules together, just to remind ourselves that we were alive.
This is why I now feel grateful to have lived in NYC on 9/11. It gave me the experience of being connected to others in something bigger than any of us alone. Love, kindness, compassion, human connection— these seemed to seep out of the pores of every New Yorker.
Volunteering with Families and Rescue Workers
I also feel grateful because my NYU psychologist ID gave me the chance to be useful at a time when we all felt otherwise helpless. I spent hours one day teamed up with an NYPD officer named Bill. We met with family members of missing people to gather identifying information about their loved ones. Bill asked me to be the one to explain how DNA would be used to identify bodies that were otherwise unidentifiable— he found it too hard to say this out loud. Some family members didn't understand. Others just wanted to voice their fears: "I have so many questions for you: how will I take care of my mother if my father isn't found?"; "My brother has terrible anxiety and asthma. I'm certain he's one of the people who jumped."
I also met with hospital workers, janitors, nurses, and doctors. Several initially insisted they had no need to talk to a therapist, that they were fine and only worried about their loved ones or their patients. Not knowing what else to do, I just hung around with them in the cafeteria, making small talk. But soon there'd be a group of them gathered at one of those long cafeteria tables, telling their individual, deeply personal 9/11 stories, processing their grief, fear, and anger. Sometimes, the current trauma added salt to old wounds. One medic expressed upset that his ex-girlfriend hadn't called to see if he was ok. Didn't she still care about him? He felt so lonely. Their stories revealed the layered depth and massive scope of the trauma that had been endured by so many people.
A group of hospital workers expressed their rage about being treated poorly despite making the long (public transportation was disrupted), dangerous (nobody felt safe) trip to work every day. Their pay was docked when they arrived late (due to the disrputions with public transportation) and they worked long, difficult hours with few breaks. They wanted respect like the medical staff received. Expressing their feelings and having their experience be heard and validated transformed their angry energy into an organized plan to speak productively with their superiors about their grievances. What a privilege it was for me to take part in their organizing and regaining a semblance of control over their lives.
I saw how large organizations and institutions can get in their own way during a crisis— and also how they can coordinate and come together effectively when they stay flexible. I saw NYPD officers take a young psychologist (that would be me) seriously and put her feedback into action to keep a large group of panicked, grieving family members calm. And I learned that I could present as calm and be effective, even while I felt internally panicked right along with them.
I saw how rapidly groups of professionals could gather resources and get them to the people who needed them.
I saw that people didn't go to the grief counseling drop-in centers, but they did open up if you just hung around casually with them.
And I learned that if the ground beneath you is suddenly vibrating for no apparent reason, something is very wrong. (In this case, it was a nearby World Trade Center tower collapsing. Fortunately, no one was injured.)
I also heard many horrific stories from the nurses and doctors who worked triage on 9/11 that I detailed in my journal. I won't share them here, but I want to at least acknowledge them, as a way of honoring both the victims and the medical staff who courageously treated them, as well as myself and my colleagues for having absorbed them.
Trauma Interferes with Thinking
In the aftermath of 9/11, I saw that significant anxiety and trauma can impair thinking and executive functioning. On a personal level, I couldn't make a single decision on my own that first week. What to eat, where to volunteer, whether to stay home and be alone or venture out into the scary world…
We told parents and grieving family members how important it is to return to the normalcy of daily routines. Then I experienced this firsthand when on September 17th, six days after 9/11 had eliminated whatever naïve, ignorant sense of safety I'd held, I returned to work. It felt good. It felt familiar. It felt normal(ish). My ability to make decisions resurfaced.
Processing Through Play
Once back at work, I witnessed the power of play for processing feelings and experience. Every single child I worked with played with some kind of building toy— mostly Jenga and Legos, but also anything that could be stacked, like checkers— building and destroying towers, over and over again. Sometimes the kids named the towers the Twin Towers, and some played out the planes crashing into them. Others just built and destroyed, built and destroyed, built and destroyed. One immigrant teenager used art to process it her own way— she knitted me an American flag.
We’re All Just People
I was reminded of the humanity in all of us — we're just people, after all. One tenet of therapy is that we, the therapists, remain blank slates for our patients, so they can use us however they need to. But I found it deeply impactful to be confronted with the reality that my own therapist— who lived and worked in Tribeca, just blocks from the World Trade Center, and who had to evacuate for the first week to keep his family safe— was a regular, vulnerable human, just like me.
Coping: personal and professional lessons learned
So twenty-five years after part of New York City, along with my sense of the world, came crumbling down, here are some final thoughts that emerged when I paused and reflected on my experience of September 11, 2001:
At the time, I felt so endangered and threatened that I couldn't imagine I’d survive to see 2002. Yet here I am, twenty-five years later. I'm aware of how quickly time passes, how we move through the hardest stretches, how we heal and live even while we suffer. I believe this understanding helped me navigate the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as other challenging periods in my life. I have two young adult children who weren't even alive in 2001. It's mind-blowing to me that an event so enormous and formative in my life is, to them, a historical event they only know secondhand.
I hadn't realized until I began writing this that my experiences around 9/11, when I was just a fledgling psychologist, actually informed the manner in which I would come to conduct therapy. I've strongly incorporated my understanding that people won’t be open and vulnerable unless they feel a sense of comfort, safety, and trust, as well as control and agency. And I came to appreciate the value of being a real human. These understandings inform how I show up in the therapy room with my patients every day.
In addition, I now pay greater attention to the negative impact of extreme stress on cognitive functioning, and to how often anxiety can present as anger. This helps me to have greater compassion, not just for others but also for myself.
And I discovered that part of coping with tragedy is simply to keep living— despite the pain, the fear, the anger— hour by hour, day by day, until, before we know it, twenty-five years have passed. And if we're fortunate, twenty-five years later, we're still living our lives.
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