09/11/2026
I still remember like it was yesterday...
I was a junior staffer at a staffing agency. An ordinary Tuesday morning, until people started walking in from the cafe next door, saying one of the towers had been hit.
I remember thinking it was a mistake. A pilot error.
At the time, I was dating a Jordanian man who worked as an airplane mechanic at the airport. When the second plane hit, something in me broke open. I called him immediately. I begged him to go home, to be safe. He wasn't worried. I was terrified.
When I finally got home, I learned something that undid me completely. There were children whose parents worked in the towers. Parents who never came to pick them up from school.
Little ones waiting at school, waiting for someone who was never coming.
How people could do this to other people. Then came the rest of it. The Pentagon. The plane that never reached its target because a group of strangers on board chose, in their final moments, to save others instead of themselves. The images of people choosing to jump rather than burn. And years later, learning how many first responders got sick, how many gave their lives twice — once running toward danger, and again slowly, from cancer, because they loved their city enough to stay.
Most of us are just witnesses to tragedy. It is not our pain directly, so it becomes easier to look away. Easier to scroll past. Easier to let someone else's suffering stay someone else's. It is uncomfortable to feel what isn't ours to feel, so we've quietly trained ourselves not to.
Somewhere along the way, we started treating pain like an enemy instead of what it actually is: a messenger.
But pain itself is just information. It's the signal that something is out of alignment, that a boundary has been crossed, that a piece of our humanity is asking to be acknowledged. Pain protects us.
I think the most dangerous thing we're facing now is apathy. It's the slow, quiet decision to ignore pain simply because it isn't our own.
If this day means anything all these years later, I hope it's this: don't let the discomfort of someone else's pain turn you away from it. Let it turn you toward each other instead.
