I am a survivor of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. I lived four blocks due east of the Towers.
I lost my home that day, was homeless and destitute for years, and in 2018, after extensive vetting by the CDC, NIH, and NIOSH, was given a Zadroga Act diagnosis of 9/11-connected PTSD as a result of my experience and exposure to the aftermath in the World Trade Center Disaster Area from 9/11/01-1/20/02.
Monday will be the 22nd anniversary. As always, I will mark the day with my family and loved ones, and I may or may not be online that day and evening... every year is different.
I no longer dread it, and neither should you. Speaking as the only person most of you will ever likely know who was directly affected, literally a card-carrying Certified Survivor of 9/11, I hereby grant you freedom from all anxiety, guilt, despair, anger, resentment, discomfort, and anything and everything else that remains in your spirit and mind and heart that troubles you about that day, that has never quite resolved, that prevents you from sharing the joy in my own heart at having survived, at being alive.
If you must be angry, be angry at the way we were used in the years that followed, but do not aim that anger at us any longer. We who were injured in the attacks that day are not the ones to blame, nor did we have any say in or influence over anything that flowed from them. We who survived are not to blame for the bigotry you suffered or the wars that followed or the scorn of your view of this country and its leaders. We did not slaughter untold millions of innocents in faraway lands.
The random, free-floating anger, the wishes that we too had died in the attacks, the perverse cries to me and others of "you deserved it!", make those who attack us complicit in the attacks of that day - because we were targeted for 22 years in the same way that the terrorists targeted us for slaughter that morning.
The home I knew and the place I loved no longer exists. What's there now belongs to another generation, where new life has grown out of the charnel house of devastation, where memories have been made and children have played and careers have flourished and love has been found and lost and found again, and there is comfort there.
Don't worry about us; we take care of our own. You honor us best by living as we do: fully, freely, always going forward, always in the light.
I will keep you close in the days ahead. You are never far from my heart.
Louis saying no to a fan's invitation to take a shot.
"Huh? What is it? No I'm going to have a night off tonight, you know, I'm just trying to keep it ... (while taking selfie) this could have been the start of my demise, and you could have caused it”