9/11: 20 Years of Reflection

On 9/11 in 2021, 20 years after the attacks, I wrote my story about what happened to me that day and in the aftermath. If you haven’t read that yet, I suggest reading that first here. While writing that history, I also spent a good deal of time reflecting and processing those events with a new lens. The following are my reflections on those events 20 years later.

Social, Communication, Isolation

We had no idea what was happening the day of 9/11 because it was impossible to get real time communication and news. This was in the time before smartphones were common and social media didn’t exist. Information just moved slower 20 years ago. Moreover, even cell phone calls weren’t working that day which meant that all mobile communication was non-functional. Everyone in the area was alone, isolated and cut off from everyone they knew. Everyone who was there has stories about trying desperately to reach people they knew. Most people (like me) had to make several tries, or call people who called other people, who finally reached their loved ones. Everyone was completely cut off from everyone they weren’t physically near.

When I met up with Jared, we went to his brother’s apartment to spend time in person with more people we knew. We craved human contact. We didn’t really know what was going to happen, but we knew we needed to be around other people and share the experience. Since even phone calls were out, we had to be with other people in person. It was literally the only way. And you bonded deeply with whoever was around.

Once I got home to New Jersey, Felisa and I were alone. We had just moved to a new town after college and we had just gotten married. I was working long hours and she was in grad school, also working long hours. We had no support network in town, no friends. We really only knew the people we worked with. For many days afterwards, we didn’t want to leave each other’s sight — I went to work at her office near her lab with her just so neither of us would be alone. The first day I went back to work and commuted to Wall St two weeks later was one of the hardest days of my life. Saying goodbye at the train station was…. rough.

If we think about how this would play out now, everyone on the train would have had real time news alerts alerting them to every event as it was unfolding, there would have been a flurry of asynchronous messages from various locations to friends and loved ones, social media would have been a massive asynchronous support network, the in person interactions would have been different. The whole feeling of the day would have been really different.

Unhealthy Business and Cultural Norms

It was common in the early 2000’s for companies to give small vacation amounts to new hires (typically about 2 weeks of vacation per year) and also a limited number of sick days (I think I had 5 sick days). This meant that when I woke up the morning of 9/11, I had to decide if I was really sick enough to use one of my sick days. Clearly, you should not have a limited amount of sick days! If you’re sick, you should not work, especially in person, commuting on multiple forms of transit, and then in an office. There is so much wrong with that I don’t even know where to start. So really, the morning of 9/11/2001, I should have been at home in my pajamas watching TV rather than being in the middle of a terrorist attack. Let’s start there.

I learned another hard lesson a few days later from my employer. At the time, I was working at a consulting company that was billing my time at about 10 times what they paid me, and I was totally OK with this. It was my first job out of music conservatory with no formal computer science training, and yet there I was, building trading systems on Wall Street and learning SO MUCH. They got me there, they covered my vacation time and benefits. I felt like I had won the lottery! Then a few days after 9/11, I got a call from the CEO of the consulting company I worked for saying that if I couldn’t start billing JP Morgan for my time, I had to take vacation days, and once that ran out I would stop being paid. I remember being taken aback at the callousness of the CEO, and how out of touch this felt. There was a national emergency going on, an unknown crisis, and he was fixated on making his cut off of some 22 year olds billable hours? Nope! I was angry and frustrated. I knew if I would ever be in charge of a business one day, this is exactly the opposite of how I would operate.

Less than 2 weeks after the attacks, I was back at work, in person on Wall St. I commuted for 2.5–3 hours each way (5–6 hours a day, seriously)! I made my way past military security checkpoints, watched dump truck after dump truck of debris, watched coroner after coroner, and breathed in putrid and toxic air — unprotected — for years. It was physically and emotionally exhausting. It was literally soul crushing. I didn’t have the space to have physical and emotional safety, or even to process how I was feeling. I had two choices: go to work and deal with everything, or quit. There was no middle ground. I was young with little savings, making good money and learning a lot, and supporting myself and my wife. It felt wrong to throw that all away to avoid commuting. But if I could go back now, I would have quit instead of going back to work on Wall St. for even a single day.

I had a persistent headache that only went away after I moved away from NYC in 2006, and still flares up every time there is a fire here in California.

Mental Health

The commute, the air quality, the stress of work, and how trapped I felt took a huge emotional toll. I was young and inexperienced. I wasn’t in touch with my emotions let alone how to express them, or process them, or manage them. I just did what I thought was right, what I was supposed to do, even though it was literally killing me every day. I worked in finance in NYC for another 5 years after 9/11. Over the years, I became more angry, more dogmatic, more frustrated and bitter about my jobs. It took me a few years after moving out of the area to come into my own, to process all of what we had been through, and to become the person I wanted to be. And it was nothing like the person I was when I left finance in 2006.

The culture I experienced at many Wall St. investment banks was also incredibly toxic. I always blamed my anger and depression at the work culture I was around. But looking back now, I see clearly that wasn’t the whole story. I can still feel the toll of the daily soul crushing, going back and forth from New Jersey to Wall St., the bad air for years, the lingering depression and guilt. Now I can only wonder what effect being in the area had on me, and what part of how I felt back then was because of the recurring trauma. All I know is I never want to feel that way again.