Over and Over Again: Introduction
It’s been 16 years and September 11 cuts me down every time it rolls up on the calendar.
I don’t know anyone who was seriously injured or killed that day. I was living and working in Manhattan but wasn’t anywhere near the World Trade Center. I was just some guy with a desk job who at the right time happened to be not at the wrong place. I wasn’t even one of those people who had to walk home across a bridge that day to another borough. As an American, I felt attacked and afraid, but probably not more or less so than any other American.
But every year, on September 11, I wake up and slide into a morning of sadness. It feels achingly self-indulgent because I can’t figure out why I feel that way. And it gets stronger every year.
I recently remembered that during the week of September 11, 2001, so many friends and family called and emailed to make sure things were OK that I just started posting to my blog about what was going on that week — yes, we had blogs back then. A few news outlets from around the world had picked up on my posts —some bittersweet media exposure.
Trying to solve the mystery of why each September 11 is more acute to me than the last, I dug those September 11, 2001 blog posts up from the recesses of my hard drive — the actual blog has been offline for years. Here are some things I learned after reading them for the first time in nearly 16 years:
- I think am a much better writer now. If you move on to read those old blog posts by 2001 me, you’ll pick this up within the first sentence or two. It’s not high-school-poetry bad, but there’s enough for an inner wince from me here and there. Granted, I wrote those in a rush and didn’t do much editing, but still. BTW, if you’re reading this and are in high school, your poetry is really good and you should write more of it.
- The posts are intentionally mostly devoid of emotion. I recall that being an intentional choice, but it also reflects the numbness that infused much of New York City that week between bouts of collective despair.
- I’m struck — as a fortysomething me — at the casualness of some of the asides and observations of my twentysomething self. In some ways, I see it as that kind of being how my writing style has always been. But I also see it as a coping tool for what was going on all around me.
- I think I was trying to convey in large part was the ordinariness that settled in that week. In one sense, everything was off and wrong. But at the same time, ordinariness set in to keep things going. Something to be both thankful and wary of in these kinds of situations.
After reading all of my September 11 posts, one strand is pretty clear: I’m picking up a tension in the posts between what my expectations for reality were at the time and the cracks that day created in my reality.
In a lot of ways, I feel that we’ve been trapped in an ongoing September 11 world — the panic has increased, those scrolling headlines at the bottom of cable news screens that went into play during that time are still threading fear wherever they crawl (the immediacy of which has largely been replaced by things like Twitter), the global goodwill we chucked as a nation hasn’t come back (especially now), the political division within our culture that September 11 exacerbated has only grown. If you’re old enough, it’s a “post-9/11 world” after all, wherever you look, forever and ever and ever.
And Ithat strand leads me to understand that one of the reasons I get more and more down every September 11 is that I was there, a functioning young-ish adult, in New York City when the rift ripped and reshaped reality. And the further away we get, I meet and see a lot of younger people who weren’t around for it, and are growing up in a world that still doesn’t feel quite right to me, parallel to the one I was in before. And they seem alright. And I don’t know who I’m sad for at that point, me or them.
But that’s just my own reality. Am I special? No. Does this have anything to do with me being in New York City that day? Probably not.
I’ve reposted those 2001 blog posts to Medium. To keep that week fresh in my head. To continue to answer the occasional question of what it was like to be there. To attempt to move past trying to solve the mystery of that week’s personal impact.
The first one is live today, and I’ll be adding the remaining posts throughout the week.
- Journal Entry — Tuesday Morning, September 11, 2001
- Journal Entry — Tuesday Afternoon, September 11, 2001
- Journal Entry — Tuesday Evening, September 11, 2001
- Journal Entry — Wednesday Morning , September 12, 2001
- Journal Entry — Wednesday Afternoon/Evening, September 12, 2001
- Journal Entry — Thursday, September 13, 2001
I occasionally write things here on Medium. Follow me on Twitter. You are also welcome to read my Ask a Lawyer column in Deadspin here. You can listen to my sometimes dark but generally funny and useful — and currently on hiatus — Ask a Lawyer podcast, Unwonk, here. And you can always see what I’ve been up to by visiting danralls.com.
