What the score was.

[rivka]

As long as I kept my momentum, I was okay. Most of the workday was a fine engaging rush forward, but whenever I hit a snag I got derailed. As my first post from yesterday shows.

Traffic slowed to a jam on I-95 as I drove into work, and it occurred to me that something might have happened. I felt trapped, exposed. Sirens and firetrucks on Pratt Street, several of them, and my heart leapt in a wild panic that was completely unreasonable for someone who works across the street from an ambulance bay.

I fantasized about joining a Red Cross disaster relief team the moment I get my license, really helping people next time instead of frantically spinning my wheels.

I was angry all out of proportion. At everything.

I don't want to hear saturation 9/11 coverage on Wednesday Night Baseball. Shut up and call the game. If you must talk about 9/11 nonstop, you are not then allowed to laud baseball as "an escape." (I wanted to avoid the media altogether, but at the gym you can either listen to the radio or TV. The game should've been safe.)

Church was good. I don't remember what they said in the sermon, but I felt understood, and found solace. I didn't know how to pray. Over the candle I lit I said silently, "Dona eis requiem. Grant them all rest, the living and the dead." That seemed to serve.

I composed at least six LJ posts in my head, and didn't make any of them.

I wasn't prostrate with grief. I wasn't paralyzed with anxiety. I was sad and irritable and restless and bothered by the nagging suspicion that I didn't have a right to feel that way. That I knew the feeling to be ridiculous just added more irritation to the mix.

I didn't know what to do with myself.

I'm glad the day is over.

Comments

[odanu.livejournal.com]

Wow. I didn't know science knew how to clone days. Or feelings. Sums it up beautifully.

me too

[redbird]

One reason I did my best to avoid broadcasts yesterday is that I didn't want anyone to tell me how I felt, or how I should feel.

Re: me too

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I think that was a large part of my media avoidance yesterday, too. The rest was, judging by how I feel now, just being plain sick to death of it.

[ororo.livejournal.com]

I felt like that last year as well as this one and felt vaguely guilty about not having any tears. I just want it to go away already.

*hugs*

If you need to yack, find laptopwench on AIM.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

That sounds positively frustrating.

Could you have tried to do too much? It sounds like you had an *incredibly* busy and full day, at a time that quiet, low-key introspection might have worked better. I'm not at all surprised that you felt agitated, given everything that was going on at once.

May today be a better day. *hugs*

-J

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

I wasn't prostrate with grief. I wasn't paralyzed with anxiety. I was sad and irritable and restless and bothered by the nagging suspicion that I didn't have a right to feel that way. That I knew the feeling to be ridiculous just added more irritation to the mix.

I didn't know what to do with myself.

I'm glad the day is over.

That sounds very familiar. Only for me it happened on Sept 12, not Sept 11. That was one of the weird bits, for me... being in Australia, across the dateline, the actual anniversary of that horrible day was a day later than for those in NorAm. Sept 12 was the anniversary of stumbling out of bed to read my email over breakfast the way I always do, and finding that the world had suddenly gone to hell in a handbasket, taking friends of mine with it as it went. Sept 12 was the anniversary of the nightmare, for me. I had been wondering how I was going to go on Sept 11, and it actually turned out to be an ok day. I avoided the media except for in the evening when I watched a tv show that looked at engineering aspects of the WTC as they affected the outcomes of that day, and after that I watched a fascinating documentary that followed a group of NY firemen throughout the period leading up to and including 9/11, where the cameramen wound up going *into* the Towers after the first plane had hit. And then I went to bed, feeling thoughtful but ok.

It was the next day, yesterday, that was weird for me, and I spent much of it feeling much as you describe here. It was just... strange. An unsettled, uneasy, strange sort of day. Not anything I'd describe as "horrible", but I breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was over.