I was 13 years old and in 8th grade and three blocks away from the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. I was in school when the first plane hit. It shook the building and my Spanish notebook dropped from the desk to the floor and we ran to the window and saw the large hole with the flames shooting out and that’s when the separation from my own reality began.
Then, a mother coming in, in tears, in panic, pulling her daughter out of class.
Then, the cafeteria, where I attempted to call my parents only to discover cell phones did not work. I thought my dad might have had a meeting downtown that day, which terrified me. I later learned my parents thought I might be dead for several hours.
Then, fast forward to on the street, walking with friends and one of their parents, when the first tower collapsed, watching an impossibly large slab of building and bodies contained within slide down 110 stories like an avalanche.
Then in a friend’s apartment, watching Charlie Brown at the insistence of one of the parents who wanted to “calm us down” (I felt too old for this).
Then my parents were finally there. Me seeing the fear in their bloodshot eyes almost scarier than everything preceding it.
“It felt like a movie.”
That’s what everyone, including me, said afterward. That’s what I told the therapist my parents had procured for me in the months after. That’s what we said in the processing circles back at school months later (after the school building had been repaired and cleaned—though the area was still a mess; dump trucks filled with debris would drive by on our lunch break and wind would kick up the dust and deliver it to our faces and nostrils and we’d laugh like it was funny).
This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve written about what happened that day. It’s taken me until now to feel comfortable. Not because I was unaware of its impact on my brain and body and life, but because I was very aware, and so, until recently, kept it behind a screen. Like a movie.
The anniversary of September 11th has always been hard, less because of the memories (those exist no matter the date), and more because of the constant deluge of content—the patriotic grifters on one side imploring us to be More American Than Ever, and the meme-ers on the other side, making light of what was a real tragedy.
I understand the impulse—to meme-ify this thing that has become a symbol for the cynical, trauma-mining jingoism of American life. But I also think it’s a way to do what I did, what all my friends did, after 9/11—to minimize its impact on us. Because whether you were there or not; whether you were born before or after, that event has deeply and tragically affected our lives—taken away your personal freedoms in the form of the Patriot Act; put blood on your hands and guilt in your hearts in the form of endless war on foreign soils. We’re all trying to put it behind a screen; to make it a movie.
And 9/11 is just the most obvious example of this thing I think we do all the damn time.
Recently and thankfully I have been in a period of life in which I do not feel addicted to the internet, and so, when I use it, I can see what it is with a bit of perspective. And I think that that’s a large part of what it is: a dissociation machine. As the world gets worse, we have our constant companion—our movie maker—right in our pockets. It’s too hard to touch the real reality—the conditions that breed constant trauma—directly. So we make it a simulacrum. Filter it. Put it behind a screen.
Unfortunately, as anyone diagnosed with PTSD can tell you, dissociation can only work as a coping mechanism for so long. And then it turns into something much worse.
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