Remembering September 11
To my thirteen-year-old self.
You probably can’t imagine twenty years into the future, but here I am, remembering you as if the past two decades were hardly any time at all. And yet, I hardly recognize you.
You were likely up early that day because you were an over-achieving homeschooler who wanted to get her vocabulary homework out of the way before breakfast. And when your parents called you in to watch the news after the first tower was hit, you didn’t understand something so devastating as the violence you witnessed in real time. You thought it was a joke.
I cringe to even write that, but I know now that you were in shock. You were processing that the world wasn’t quite as predictable or safe as you wanted to believe. That people could die in such horror.
And then the second tower was hit while you were watching.
You didn’t have the mental construct to understand how many lives were ruined that day, or in the years following. All you could do was feel the wrongness, the distress, the terror.
The following Sunday at church, your pastor raged from the pulpit about the terrorist attack. You wrote in your journal later how he said that this was a punishment from God for America’s sins, so-called sins like homosexuality. His voice made you feel uncomfortable, a little scared. But what he said filled in the gap of the unknown. It gave you an answer to your questions.
This wasn’t the only time your pastor talked about God’s judgment. Natural events like hurricanes and tsunamis were also the weapons of God against us sinful humans. God hated us, unless we were one of the few chosen people. And when you are a chosen one, you are trained to see others as worthy of God’s wrath.
Twenty years later, I sometimes wonder how I survived the toxic teachings that were your everyday air. You felt the trauma of the violence in the world, and then you experienced the trauma of spiritual abuse, of “men of God” teaching you to hate instead of love.
Sometimes I’m angry with you for your judgmental mindset and your ignorance. And other times I want to thank you for taking note every time your empathy was violated. Even though you did what you thought you needed to do to conform, you kept a secret space in your heart for compassion. You held onto a small string of autonomy that enabled you to one day reconsider, question, change.
Twenty years later I am better able to grieve the loss you witnessed and experienced on 9/11, now that I no longer believe in the narrative you were told. I don’t have all the answers, but choosing love, empathy, and understanding has proven a sacred journey.
I find it difficult to hold at once the pain and loss of that day, the war and the war crimes, both the bravery and the violent actions of Americans, our own bigotry and blindness, and still the potential for goodness in all of us.
You have been taught a simplistic, fear-based, hate-filled narrative of what happened that day, but in the future, you will learn that grappling with complexity will bring you out of the darkness of toxic beliefs into a more hope-filled and compassionate understanding of your world. And the sooner you realize this, the sooner you will break free.