September 11 always hits me differently because I remember exactly where I was when the world cha...September 11 always hits me differently because I remember exactly where I was when the world cha...
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jerm's avatar
jerm .
• 1h
September 11 always hits me differently because I remember exactly where I was when the world changed.
I was in Germany, outside Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg. It was around five in the afternoon there when I learned what was happening back home.
I was young, thousands of miles from the United States, standing outside an American military installation watching something unfold that none of us could fully understand yet.
There are moments in life where you can almost feel a line being drawn.
There was the world before that afternoon, and there was the world after it.
I had no idea then what my own life would look like either.
The years that followed took me through places I never could have predicted. Some good. Some dark. Addiction, trouble, incarceration, starting over, getting lost, finding direction again.
And eventually technology.
Today I'm a founder. I build software, work with AI, write, create, and spend most of my waking hours trying to understand things that didn't even exist in anything resembling their current form when I was standing outside Campbell Barracks that afternoon.
That's strange to think about.
Twenty-five years is enough time to watch the world transform and to become almost unrecognizable to an earlier version of yourself.
But I can still picture that young man in Germany.
He didn't know what was coming for the world.
He definitely didn't know what was coming for him.
Today I remember the people who left home that morning and never got the opportunity to see what the next 25 years would bring.
And I'm reminded not to waste the fact that I did.
September 11, 2001.
Never forgotten.
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