Reflections on Resilience

I was a young adult on 9/11/01.

After watching people walk over the Brooklyn Bridge covered in white plaster, after biking quickly to my old high school to see if the kids needed help, after running to hospitals to try to give blood to people who were dead, after seeing pages from law books blow over the Hudson to my front door on Atlantic Avenue, I was sure I was going to join the military to fight a war. I was ready.

I have a soldier part in me. One that wants to physically fight. I love this part because she’s scrappy and takes no shit. But she’s also not strategic or articulate—and she rarely actually wins a fight.

She’s been known to reprimand turnstile jumpers, tell catcallers to fuck off, and run into the water to grab a child who’s not, in fact, drowning. She’s highly protective and vicious. She’s a partisan and a pioneer—and her endurance seems limitless. But her cerebral cortex is barely engaged. It’s all just anger and survival.

Then, after some calm, my system is ready to listen to reason. On September 13th, 2001, when I saw the National Guard and tanks rolling through my city, I just became deeply sad. Only then was I able to read about Al-qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, and about how the world seemed lost. The global citizens were furious at us. But why did they have to hurt my city? My people? Why did they have to take their anger out on me?

Those of us who lived through it remember what our bodies told us on 9/11.

Some of us lost friends and family and the grief ripped at our hearts.

Some of us went from fiercely protective to gravely sad, like me.

Some had previous traumas retriggered.

Today I am thinking of all those who lost friends and family in the attacks—and in the long, terrible, misguided wars that never should have taken place, and did not remotely redress the pain of that day.

Take some time today to see what the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks brings up in you. And if you are ever processing hard memories or active trauma, consider working with me.