Ten Years On
So, I feel like I have to do this. I know everyone is writing about 9/11 and how we’ve changed, how scary it was, how we are now living in an age of terror.
But the most profound thing I read about 9/11, and the thing that made me shake my head and say “yes,” was this, from the New York Times web site:
“What is amazing is that in that moment, there was a moment before that we saw that plane, that second plane, and there was a moment after, and it’s like two different worlds, those two moments. I mean, literally, I can feel like I can remember the exact second when the whole world changed and my life changed forever.”
There was that moment, and whether you were watching on TV or live, whether it happened as you saw the plane slide into the second tower or you heard a newscaster or saw a newspaper or listened to a friend recount the story, you knew, as soon as you received the information, you knew your life had changed.
I detailed this day, very intensely, in my book. I was just graduated, unemployed, feeling hopeless and miserable about life in general. I felt fat. I felt like my life would never take up the promise that had been all but assured me on entering Georgetown. I felt like, for the first time, my decision not to go into medicine might have been a fatal mistake. And then my mother called, screaming, insisting that I turn on the television because there had been some sort of accident at the Twin Towers and we didn’t know where my sister was and she had to go – and the phone cut off. I tore out of bed and ran downstairs to find only one channel of television working.
And I saw it. One building on fire. An accident. A horrible accident. Those poor people, those poor people in the building. How horrible, how horrible that a plane happened to hit another structure full of innocent lives, I thought.
Until the black wasp, that shadow, appeared on the left side of the screen, slid into the second tower so smoothly, so effortlessly. That was it. That was the moment. There was a me before that moment and a me after that moment and they are vastly different people, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
Because how do you measure something that big as it’s happening? You don’t. My only way out into the world during that horrible day was the Internet. The Internet worked and that’s all I needed to know: I ran toward it and it ran toward me, filling my screen with messages of support, hope, and love, from this new tiny little community I had joined online: the Harry Potter fandom. They kept me going that day. They kept me sane and functioning. They helped me through not knowing where my sister was, not knowing where my father was, getting conflicting reports about the evacuations, thinking the White House had been hit, hearing there was another hijacked plane over Boston, from looking out my window in Staten Island and wondering when our little town would go up in flames.
I realize today that I think about that day a lot. There is the obvious change that won’t ever be lost on me: that on that day 10 years ago I was an unemployed college graduate with little career prospects who had barely dipped a toe into the Harry Potter world and now I am a New York Times bestselling author who runs several companies and is living in London part of the time, working on an official project of J.K. Rowling’s. I mean, this has not escaped me and I am grateful for my luck and the hard work I’ve done to foster that luck every day. (Luck is nothing without hard work, and for all the luck I’ve had I am more grateful than anyone knows that I learned early the value of hard work, or my life wouldn’t have taken these turns.)
But that day was about far more than a turning point for me personally. I think about being pinned to the computer and recognizing that the Internet wasn’t just a way to pass my jobless time. It could help, shape, change lives. That the things we put online and the way we interacted there mattered, that how we created and fostered and treated our community would mean a lot to people in very real ways.
I look today at all that has happened since, and not just with my personal career and life growth – but with Leaky, with the things we are doing with LeakyCon, with the partnerships we have made and communities we have helped bridge. I look at our charity work, which has – 100% literally – saved thousands of lives. I look at the people in Doctor Who costumes and going to Nerdfighter gatherings at LeakyCon. I look at the general tenor of LeakyCon, which was to provide people a place they could fully be themselves. At the live podcasts we’ve done, the sites we’ve created, the books we’ve written, the lives we’ve touched, the friendships we’ve enabled – all of it, at least for me, came from that day when I realized on some subconscious level that time spent creating an online home for fans was a worthwhile activity. It’s now the main focus of my life.
It’s my own little contribution to the truism that strength and prosperity can come from the hardest days. I don’t pretend to be even half as closely devastated by that day as those who lost people, those whose lives had severe personal or economic hardship since. I am one of the lucky ones. But I’m also lucky enough to have been close enough to it to witness and feel the change. Even if 9/11 is always a ghostly day of horror in my mind, what has come since has been a feeling of power, a feeling of importance in our everyday lives, a feeling that it can all be gone in an instant, and most of all a certainty, so deep and strong you never even have to acknowledge it, that the only way to honor those who lost everything is to live with everything you have.
My thoughts, prayers and love go out to all of you today.
Related Posts
| September 11th, 2011 | Posted in family, Featured, friends, new york |
September 11th, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Beautifully written, Melissa. I watched the terror unfold from the other side of the Atlantic. My boyfriend lived in New York. His phone wasn’t working, and he wasn’t replying to my emails. I knew, statistically, that there was only a tiny chance of him being in Manhattan, nevermind being close to the Twin Towers. But there was a period of about two hours where I didn’t know, and it was terrifying. I was in work, so I wasn’t able to watch the TV. I had minimal Internet access. The radio was on, so I built up the picture in my mind, and I had never experienced such a feeling of desperate shock for the people affected. When I heard from my boyfriend, my own personal worry decreased, but the shock and sadness remained. I just couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen, and how the world could change utterly in a matter of hours.
September 11th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
You’d think that being French would have attenuated the shock, but it doesn’t work that way.
I had no one in America I really knew, not even on the Internet because my English wasn’t that good back then but I’ll always remember that day.
****
It was during Lunch Break so I was at home, my first class (I was in Junior-High) didn’t start until 3h30 so I was listening to the TV with one ear while reading.
When it came on the news I turned my head so fast towards the screen my hair clip fell off.
I don’t think I really understood what was going on, I must have stared at the same videos getting played and replayed for 40min before my mother told me it was time to go to school.
**
**
15min later at was at school but I barely remembered walking and I saw my group of friends, they all looked out of it. I walked up to them and they looked at me for a long time and then one of them just said :
“You saw it?” I nodded and we stayed silent after that.
If a few of us had tears rolling down our cheeks nobody mentioned it, and we made a point not to notice tears in our teachers’ eyes.
September 11th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
All I can say is wow. Very inspirational. Thank you so much for sharing.
September 11th, 2011 at 1:53 pm
This is beautiful Melissa! <3
I was eight when it happend. And I've been trying to get a grip of how it was back then but it's really hard. I have a vague memory of sitting in front of the tellie with my entire family at watching picuters of both of the towers fall to the ground.
But that's all I remember. I didn't understand the absolute horror of the attack, nor did I understand how big it all was.
This May I was in New York with my school and during that trip we went to Ground Zero. And I think that was one of my most surreal experience ever. Every year since 2001 I've realized a bit more how huge 9/11 is. But I'm not sure I will ever fully understand the hugeness of the happening. But at least I'll be able to tell other people about it, even though I didn't loose anyone I knew or loved, even though I don't even live in the US, I was old enough to remember that I saw pictures of both of the towers fall.
September 11th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Beautifully written Melissa,
I am English, and grew up in central London when the IRA were setting off explosives, I could see the damaged GPO tower from my bedroom window. Though the damage and bombs were smaller in scale, it did change me too. Perhaps not outwardly, my parents had already lived through the London blitz, it made me just a little more cautious inside.
I remember when I first heard about the attacks on the twin towers. It was a text from a friend, ‘turn on sky news now!’. I was living in a tiny room in Ireland, turned on the tele and was glued to the screen, the second tower had not been attacked at that stage. Total shock, and as many others did, thought it was an accident. Until the second plane.
Today I watched the history channel show amateur footage of the events as they happened. I watched as the fireman walked towards the second tower ‘we are going in’, it looked a good distance away on foot so I am hoping that they didn’t get to it.
And now I am watching sky news again. The memorial services, and again my eyes are swimming with the pain and sorrow. I had to mute the sound on Paul Simon, too much pain.
I have been to Boston some years ago but only saw JFK airport. One day I will make it to New York and go to the remembrance site and pay my respects in person.
Take care.
David
September 11th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
Beautifully written as always, Melissa. I had almost forgotten that part of your book, to be really honest, but when you mentioned it, it all came back to me, too. I hadn’t gotten into HP yet (yes, yes, I was a late bloomer in that regard), but was involved in other online friendships by then. And by the end of 2001, I was neck-deep in HP-dom,too.
Even after all this time, what has stuck with me (both from that day and the days and years that have followed), as much as anything, is just what you’ve described: that feeling of being connected to a much larger society, a much more global community, simply b/c of this thing called the internet. I wasn’t at home that day; I was near Dallas, TX, and had to drive three hours home to where the rest of my family was. My husband called that morning to tell me to turn on the TV, and my dad and I listened to the radio all the way home — in between phone calls I received from “online friends” who were all checking in on each other as best we could (how bizarre to remember that we weren’t all texting/online via our phones back then!).
Your book and your blog remind me, over and over again, how very much this “online world” has changed our lives, and how very, very much we have to be grateful for, no matter what else may happen — we have each other, in ways that we could perhaps only begin to imagine back then.
Thank you for reminding me of that, yet again.