If your birthday is before the 90s, you likely have a visceral memory seared into your psyche of the first moment your unscarred eyes laid witness to the twin towering infernos haunting the lower Manhattan skyline.

And for the last 25 years, there’s been a collective, cultural question: 

Where were you the day the world changed?

But the answer to that question is never a place. We don’t just say “I was at work”, or “I was at school”, or “I was at home”.

No — the answer to that question is always a story.

👉 If you feel like you’re forgetting, just start writing.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

So why is that question never answered with a blunt, logical, matter-of-fact response?

Because our inefficient human brains don’t work that way. 

And as much as we like to think we’re a rational, fact-centered species, we don’t experience reality objectively. Instead of collecting facts, we search for meaning.

This week, I attended a 9/11 memorial event featuring a riveting keynote from John A. Eisenberg, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

And his speech opened, rather emotionally, by answering the same question the attendees had been discussing in intimate little clusters over lunch (and a critical glass of wine given the occasion) prior to the official presentation commencing:

Where were you that day?

Mr. Eisenberg is an astonishingly smart man, and a passionate public servant, but he’s not a natural public speaker. Nevertheless, the room was breathless as he earnestly recounted the morning of September 11th, 2001 from his vantage point as a recent Yale Law School graduate, clerking in Washington.

Over the last 25 years, we have all heard hundreds, if not thousands, of 9/11 stories. 

And while the essential facts of the day have long been established —there is no new useful information to aid our rational understanding of that event— we still seek out those stories, and cherish opportunities to tell our own.

This reveals a lot about the human race.

When you were a little kid, were you ever scolded for “telling stories”? In this framing, “telling stories” = “making shit up”.

So if you were chastised for telling stories, you were being called a liar.

The choice of vocabulary is crucial here — stories are often equated with lies because, sometimes, they are. And they’re far less verifiable than cold facts, since stories are, by nature, interpretations. They’re our mind’s method for extracting meaning.

And periodically, stories are huge lies carrying so much emotional engineering that the storyteller is capable of defrauding swaths of people out of hundreds of millions of dollars:

This is a problem, right? 

I remember the first time I took a persuasive storytelling class, and one of my (slightly combative) classmates astutely pointed out:

“Hey — isn’t this just manipulation?”

He went on to opine that surely, the best way to persuade someone and earn their trust was to share the simple, honest facts, free from our own tainted interpretations, or morphed to appeal to the psychology of our audience. The world was already filled with enough bluster. We should be better than that. 

Facts, from his point of view, were morally superior to stories.

And he might be right.

But a bad guy using stories to win people over isn’t going to be defeated by a good guy using facts to win people over. He’s going to be defeated by a good guy using better stories.

Stories are the foundational infrastructure of our human minds, not just some optional, ornamental architecture. You can’t remove the infrastructure and expect anything to work.

It’s important to know this relative to our relationships with each other.

But it’s even more important to know this relative to our relationship with ourselves.

Facts are stranger than fiction in my personal 9/11 story. I’m sharing this because while I’ve told pieces of this story countless times, I’ve never written it down.

So you’re the first ones to ever read this:

I was 14 years old, and as usual, had spent the early morning hours at the rink. My daily routine was to hit the ice at 5:30am, and train until school started at 9:15am.

Except on Tuesdays, when I needed to be at school 30-minutes early for choir practice.

On that particular Tuesday, my dad dropped me off at school, and as I walked into the music room, I felt my peripheral closing in. Within a single breath, I inexplicably lost consciousness, and fell to the floor.

I awoke in the nurse’s office a few minutes later. She had called my dad’s cell phone, and he turned around to come pick me up. My blood pressure was low, and everyone agreed I had probably trained too hard, hadn’t eaten enough, and would benefit from a day off. So dad threw me in the car, took me home, and tucked me into bed.

My next memory was dad shaking me awake:

“You have to come see this. We’re at war.”

I was hazy and confused, but he pulled me out of bed and into the living room where a live image of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center, like two terrifying chimneys, was on every channel.

I camped out on the couch in front of CNN for the rest of the week, barely ambulatory, unable to keep food down, and definitely too sick to return to school.

The timeline of the attacks played over and over and over.

And the most chilling aspect of those reports was realizing that the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, struck the North Tower at 8:46am. It was the precise moment I was walking into choir practice, and fell to the floor.

A few months after 9/11 I traveled to NYC with my mom. Again, I became listlessly ill, sleeping for long periods all afternoon, and so pale you could have seen right through me:

By then, there was a viewing platform on Fulton Street, allowing people to pay their respects at ground zero while the recovery efforts were still underway.

But the idea of visiting the site made me moribund. I couldn’t physically do it.

And just a few years later, I moved to New York. Ground zero was, by then, a giant hole in the ground. Tourists visited the perimeter and peered through the fence, but I still couldn’t bring myself to go near it. I would hold my breath while passing through the (then closed) Cortlandt Street station on the subway — a trip that always left me physically wretched.

I know what you’re thinking:

“Gimme a break Kristin, you’re not some cosmic clairvoyant.”

And you’re right. I’m boringly terrestrial, and utterly unmystical. I knew Miss Cleo was a scam when I was 11, and I feel sorry for people who actually think psychic mediums can share messages from their deceased loved ones.

But I’m choosing to risk my reputation as someone with unshakingly pragmatic common sense by sharing my experience — by sharing my story. 

As unlikely as it sounds, my memories from that day, and the months and years that followed, are inextricably linked to waves of physical sickness that ran parallel to the intensity or my proximity to those tragic events.

And there are two reasons it has taken me 25 years to write this story down:

If there is one thing I hope you take away from this odd issue of my newsletter, it’s that your stories are important. 

Write them down for others. But most importantly, write them down for yourself.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

P.S. — If you haven’t yet visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, I always recommend it to everyone visiting New York. It’s a special place. Never forget. ❤ 🇺🇸