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Nine Eleven

JT

So when I was 18 I went to NYC. The first trip outside of Europe I'd ever taken. It really changed my life in many ways, I realised a lot about the world and myself on that trip. I visited all the normal tourist spots, went up the Empire State Building, and the World Trade Centre.

A couple of months later, I was at home, preparing to start University, another life changing event, and then 9/11 happened.

I watched it all live on CNN, from when the second plane when into the South Tower. Like many people out there, I was in disbelief.

As the weeks and months followed this event I started seeing more and more footage that surfaced, and I saw the big plant pots I was sat on, in my little Virgin Airways backpack, eating a sandwich at 9am a matter of weeks before.

I started dreaming about being there again, I started having subconscious flashes of being inside the WTC, and felt in shock. I don't think I've ever got over the incident, and I still have weekly dreams about it.

So my question is, do you think you can have PTSD from an event you weren't part of? Through just being in a place?

As I found I have ASC over 20 years later, and have been considering the sensitivies I have with temperature, sound, and a very strong visual mind, I'm wondering if I lived through it subsconsiusly as it happened from afar? To still be concerned about it 20+ years later I know isn't normal

Parents

  • I wonder this quite often about WTC visitors - whether it was even worse for them (you) than the average global witness, as they (you) were on those very floors that later buckled and fell. You have sensory and tangible experience of that exact environment, the sense of what it was like to look through those windows, how the building sounded, smelled, its temperature, and your unconscious has stored every detail that your eyes took in. You were, unknowingly, on the modern equivalent of the deck of the Titanic - something that iconically tragic and catastrophic. 

    I've seen camcorder footage on YouTube of the WTC (inside and on the roof) from Aug/Sept 2001 and it is so eerie. Even if it hadn't fallen, there's something about being that high up. dwarfed by those massive roof transmiiters etc. that gives me the horrors anyway. Even the thought of being up something very tall and very famous makes me feel wobbly. I can't quite explain it - the terror of being somewhere hyper-real? 

  • in reply to Shardovan

    Thats a good description of how it feels tbh. Climbing those 111 floors in a lift in under a minute, was a weird experience even before anything terrorist like had begun.

    It feels like a memory, but also after what happened like a subconscious echo or something. Keeps coming back to me, but I wasn't there for it. Most bizarre.

    I often have dreams about people who jumped. I find I feel their pain in the moments before having no choice. Dar kstuff tbh.

  • in reply to JT

    Yes I’ve seen footage from inside the lift. That rapid escalation of numbers is so outside anything I’ve ever experienced and when you know it’s travelling through the same distance that no jumper survived and past each floor full of people counting down their final days without awareness- future ghosts…

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  • in reply to JT

    Yes I’ve seen footage from inside the lift. That rapid escalation of numbers is so outside anything I’ve ever experienced and when you know it’s travelling through the same distance that no jumper survived and past each floor full of people counting down their final days without awareness- future ghosts…

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  • in reply to Shardovan

    At the time it was just a fast moving lift of course, but I get your point :)

    For me the thing I re experience most is the sound of people talking in the entrance, then this sort of montages with the sound of people that jumped hitting the ground captured in the footage. 

    It's really taken over my memory of NYC tbh. Think I need to go back a make new memories