09/11/2026
On the morning of 9/11/2001, I was just starting my freshman year of college. I was getting ready that morning, mingling in the dorms, goofing around as I was known to do, and then, in the snap of a finger, time stood still. We had our TVs on. I heard that classrooms stopped lectures and watched together. I envision the entire country all stopping together to watch. I still donât quite understand how we all knew to watch since almost no one had cell phones back then and texting was not a thing, but we all did. We watched the smoke billow out of the first tower. We watched the second tower get hit. Shock and pain and awe and heartache and fear one right after the other, all at once. We quickly became aware that we werenât safe. We saw rescue workers give up their lives for people they didnât know, communities come together to support victims and families from across the country, and strangers holding each other up, simply because, for one unbearable morning, we were all living inside the same unfathomable experience. Inside that fear, we learned how fast we could become one.
I still remember where I was.
I still remember how I felt.
I still remember my gratitude for who our country became in the days that followed.
I still remember moving about afterward, not knowing what to do or what comes next.
9/11 was the day I learned what collective trauma was.
Over the years, I have learned more and more about the mark that day left on us as humans and as a country. I learned that people carry their experiences inside themselves; everyone responds differently to really hard and awful things; and, unfortunately, eventually, the unity we saw doesnât always stick around for the sake of good.
I learned that the body doesnât forget what the mind may push aside. Years later, many people still have a reaction to sirens, a date on the calendar, certain images, sounds, or smells. These things can pull you right back into that morning. That is what trauma does. It waits until it is triggered, and then it reactivates.
I learned that everyone in that dorm, on that campus, in this country, had a completely different internal experience. Some went numb, walking around like zombies. Some acted as if nothing had happened, returning to their day-to-day lives with little more than a blink. Some went into motion-donating blood, calling home, even joining the military. I started partying a little harder than I should have, a coping strategy disguised as a college freshman (maybe not solely rooted in this one event). All of these responses are examples of how different nervous systems respond to threat: fight, flight, freeze. None of them are wrong; all of them are legitimate survival strategies within our systems.
A part of trauma, which I also learned, is that unity created through shared fear isnât always pure or doesnât always stay pure. With time, some of that fear from some of those people turned to suspicion, division, a nervous system response of addressing threats rather than reestablishing safety.
I truly believe the trauma of that day led to so many more traumas, ones that were never addressed or given the opportunity to be felt or to heal. I donât think our country healed from that day. The 83% of us who remember that day, who were alive to witness it, still hold those moments inside of us. Twenty-five years later, we are all still looking for safety. We never had the chance to breathe. To connect. To truly give ourselves space to sit with and integrate what happened. And since? We have been buried under recession, pandemic, political fracture, economic strain, dehumanization, war, the uncontrolled advancement of technology, a news cycle that benefits from our dysregulation, and so much more.
9/11 is a quiet hum that lives in us. If today feels heavier than a single date should, it could be because your system is remembering that moment plus 25 years of buildup.
But I also believe that a nervous system that has known fear can remember safety. Healing doesnât require forgetting, pretending it didnât happen, or shaming ourselves into not responding because time has passed. It requires space. Attention. Feeling.
Connection.
Unity in safety.
Remembering humanity.
Gratefulness.
Compassion.
Presence.
Shared breath.
Twenty-five years ago, we united out of fear. Today, we get to choose to unite out of something else. But we have to choose.
