Antediluvian Man

There are some days in your life that divide everything into before and after.

For me, one of those days was September 11, 2001.

I don’t want to write this as a history lesson. There are people who experienced that day far more directly than I did, and there are stories that deserve to be told by the people who lived them.

What I want to talk about is what happened afterward.

Because sometimes the things we survive don’t simply become memories.

Sometimes they become part of us.

Before and After

Before September 11, I had already been struggling.

I had lost my job during the dot-com collapse. I had made mistakes. I was trying to figure out what came next.

Then, on September 11, everything changed.

I had previously worked for a company in the World Trade Center. That morning, I was no longer there. I was somewhere else, trying to figure out my next move.

There were people I knew who were still there.

One of them was a woman I had worked with. She was kind, funny, and someone I genuinely liked. That morning, we exchanged emails about the possibility of working together again.

Her last email to me was something along the lines of:

Let us know when you land in greener pastures.

She was trying to give me hope.

She didn’t know it would be the last message I would ever receive from her.

She didn’t know what was coming.

None of us did.

Within hours, people I knew were gone.

People I had worked with. People I had talked to. People whose lives had been completely ordinary that morning.

My old boss was able to come back into my life almost immediately because there was work to do. Things had to be rebuilt. People had to figure out how to move forward.

But there was no rebuilding the people who were gone.

And there was no going back to the person I had been that morning.

I Think It Changed Me

For a long time, I didn’t really think about how much that experience affected me.

Maybe because there were so many other things happening.

Maybe because that’s what we do sometimes.

We put things away.

We go back to work.

We take care of our families.

We pay the bills.

We keep moving.

And eventually, something that happened twenty-five years ago can feel like something that happened to somebody else.

Except I don’t think it did.

I think I became harder.

And I think I became angrier.

I already had problems with anger. I already had things inside me that I didn’t know how to handle very well.

But I wonder now whether that experience reinforced some of the things that were already there.

Maybe part of me learned that the world could change without warning.

Maybe I became more guarded.

Maybe I learned, somewhere deep down, that you shouldn’t get too comfortable because everything can disappear.

I don’t know exactly how much of my anger came from that day.

And I don’t want to pretend that it explains everything.

It doesn’t.

But I do believe now that pain can change us in ways we don’t recognize while it’s happening.

The Armor We Build

I think men are particularly good at this.

Something hurts us, so we toughen up.

Something scares us, so we get angry.

Something makes us feel powerless, so we try to regain control.

Someone hurts us, so we stop trusting people.

Eventually, what started as protection can become a personality.

We become defensive.

We become cynical.

We become easily irritated.

We stop talking about what hurts.

We tell ourselves we’re fine.

And sometimes we’re not fine at all.

We’re just wearing better armor.

The problem with armor is that it protects you from getting hurt.

But it can also keep you from feeling much of anything else.

Twenty-Five Years Later

It’s been twenty-five years.

I still think about the people who didn’t get to go home that day.

I still think about the families who had to figure out how to live without someone they loved.

I still think about that last email from a woman who was simply trying to tell me that better days might be ahead.

And maybe that’s the part I want to hold onto now.

Greener pastures.

Because she was right.

Not in the way either of us could have imagined.

Life is not always greener.

Sometimes life is unbelievably painful.

Sometimes we lose people.

Sometimes marriages end.

Sometimes we have to face things about ourselves that we’d rather avoid.

Sometimes we look back and wish we had understood ourselves sooner.

But there can still be something ahead.

There can still be another chapter.

There can still be reasons to laugh.

There can still be people to love.

There can still be a better version of ourselves waiting to be built.

Don’t Let the Pain Win

I don’t think the answer is to forget what happened.

I don’t think the answer is to pretend that terrible things don’t change us.

They do.

The question is what we do with that change.

I’ve spent a lot of my life learning about anger. I’ve had to look honestly at things I’ve done and the ways I’ve hurt people. I’ve had to learn that understanding where my anger comes from doesn’t excuse what I do with it.

And I’m beginning to understand something else:

Pain may explain some of the armor we built, but it doesn’t require us to keep wearing it.

We can take it off.

Maybe slowly.

Maybe one piece at a time.

We can learn to be vulnerable again.

We can learn to trust again.

We can learn to respond instead of react.

We can learn that being strong doesn’t always mean being hard.

And maybe most importantly, we can decide that the worst things that happened to us don’t get to determine the kind of people we become.

I can’t change September 11, 2001.

I can’t bring those people back.

I can’t rewrite the email I received that morning.

But I can decide what I do with the years I was given afterward.

I can remember without becoming consumed by it.

I can grieve without closing myself off.

I can acknowledge the anger without allowing it to run my life.

And I can still look for those greener pastures.

Because maybe that’s what hope really is.

Not believing that nothing bad will ever happen again.

It’s believing that something good can still happen anyway.

And after everything, I think that’s worth fighting for.