The 10th anniversary of 9/11 on Friday made that horrifying day forefront in everyones minds; and I was no exception. However, upon thinking about it, I realized that on September 11th, 2001, I hadn't shed a single tear.
Albeit, this is mostly because I was 5 and didn't really understand the gravity of the situation. I understood that the adults around me were all upset, and I was upset about them being upset, but no emotion stronger than that. In the following years, I continued to gain a better understanding of what had happened on 9/11, and developed a strong appreciation for the bravery and sacrifice of the people involved. I felt terrible about the people who had died that day, and even thinking about it made me a little sick. I guess I always just assumed I was sad.
But when we watched In Memoriam in history on Friday, I was literally sprawled over my desk in tears.
It was like suddenly all the emotions I was supposed to have felt on that tragic day were all bearing down at me at once, surrounding me from some out-of-nowhere, forgotten place. The fear in the hearts of the people in the building when it was hit, the sacrifice of the firefighters who scaled the collapsing towers, the agony of the family members who knew they would never see their loved ones again; all suddenly revealing themselves to me from wherever they were hiding.
How could I be sadder on the tenth anniversary of September 11th than I was on the actual day of the tragedy? Did I just never care enough before? Did I never even try to feel sad? What was wrong with me? I may have been young at the time, but I remember having a clear understanding that lives had been lost, and wasn’t that enough to invoke tears at the time? And even several years after, when I understood things better, had I really ever felt true sorrow about it? I began feeling a fierce sense of guilt for being so unaffected during what was might be one of the biggest tragedies of my lifetime.
Until I asked others if they had cried on September 11th, 2001.
Suprisingly enough, many of them said that they hadn’t. Almost all of the people my age that I asked had no recollection of crying on that day, and even some of the adults said that they hadn’t. When I asked them why they thought this was, the resounding response was, “Well, I guess it just hadn’t sunk in yet”. This gave me a thought: maybe sadness wasn’t as one dimensional as I thought it was. Maybe the nature of sadness wasn’t instantaneous. Maybe sadness didn’t always immediately invoke tears. Maybe sadness was something your mind has to process before you could feel the full affect of it.
I realized that this had actually happened to me before. When my grandfather died, I wasn’t immediately sad. The sorrow of his passing crept up on me slowly, over time until I fully realized how devastatingly his death had impacted me. It was a full year later until I started going through all photos of us together and felt the full impact of mourning.
Upon further investigation of this newfound idea of the drawn out nature of sadness, I realized that this made sadness fundamentally different from most other basic emotions. Anger is very instant in nature; when something makes you mad enough you’re immediately furious. You can be mad after the fact as well, but that ends up being something closer to resentment, or frustration, and not nearly as strong as the initial wave of emotion. Happiness is the same way; you are instantly overjoyed when something fantastic happens to you, and the happiness you feel after the fact is more a warm pleasant sensation in memory of the event that had made you so instantly joyous. Sadness seems to be much more reclusive in nature, hiding in your consciousness until suddenly revealing to you your own emotional response.
I now believe that this helps the initial sadness to develop itself into more powerful feelings of sorrow. Despite its delay, this kind of development makes sadness one of the most fiercely affecting emotions in human consciousness, which explains why it is this emotion that has been the inspiration of so many great artists. In fact, Franz Schubert, the composer, once said, “My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs”.
This idea that sadness isn’t simple or immediate is something I want to remember for the rest of my life. I felt so much guilt for not feeling truly sad about September 11th, 2001 until now, but what I didn’t realize was that I was truly devastated by the tragedy; I just wasn’t going to feel it for a while. Sadness isn’t this one dimensional feeling that always immediately occurs after something bad happens. Instead, sadness may hide in waiting, growing, developing inside of your mind and heart waiting for the right moment to show you what you are truly capable of feeling emotionally.
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