- So here's my story about
what it was like being in New York on 9/11.
I just wanna be transparent that this video is monetized
and all the money that it makes in perpetuity
is gonna go to a 9/11 charity.
It's crazy my husband
was in New York on 9/11 as well
and he joined the Marines the very next day.
He's gonna start a vlog actually tomorrow
about this very thing.
I'll put a link below.
It's the 20th anniversary.
I cannot believe that it's been that long.
I guess that's what happens when you're traumatized.
It's definitely the defining moment of our adolescence.
I just happened to be in Manhattan.
I was starting my last season of "Even Stevens".
I had just filmed "Cadet Kelly".
A couple of weeks before
I started back up on my third season.
I went to school.
I was super excited.
And if you know from my past posts,
I'm really excited about feeling sort of like
I could go to school
and sort of do my thing and be amongst my peers.
And at that time in my life,
it was really important to me,
so I had my mom make sure that I went
to my first week of senior year.
I show up.
I'm actually going to New York city
from my home in Connecticut on my own.
My mom was always really protective of me.
She never let me go to the city on my own.
When I was growing up and going to performing arts school,
she would always make sure that she was right next to me
and now as a parent, I totally understand why,
but the irony of the fact that
there was one week that she let me do my own thing
because I was a senior and we'd done this for years
and I was already trying to like push my way
into my independence,
my mom said, "Cool.
"You can take the train in,
"it's an hour and a half away,
"and you can go to school and enjoy your senior year."
I don't remember what I was wearing.
You know how some people are like,
"Do you remember what you were doing or wearing
"when Kennedy was shot?"
It's like that moment for us millennials.
Everyone's excited,
everyone's networking and chatting with each other
and like vibing and talking about prom
and all these things
and, I don't know, what kids do.
Basically, I show up super early in the morning
to my performing art school.
Like many years before,
I took a 6 a.m. train into Manhattan,
but I was there as things were happening.
I obviously heard no noises
because I was in the brownstone of my school.
You couldn't hear anything like that.
I think we were like in our first class or so,
we all get taken out
and there's like an announcement on the speaker
and everybody has to be congregated into
the main locker hall.
And I remember our principal and our headmistress
and like everybody that was in charge of my school,
teachers, every single body was accounted for
and in one place.
And it was weird.
Granted, we didn't have a very big school,
but it still never happened before.
We had no idea what was going on.
Nobody heard anything.
We all had cell phones at the time,
but we're talking flip phones.
We're not talking Google on your phone.
And what we didn't know is that the internet was taken out
at that time.
We all get taken into a space
and we're all getting talked to,
and they handled it really well.
I can say about my school.
They were like, "Listen, there's been an attack
"at the World Trade Center."
I didn't even know what the World Trade Center was.
And so we were all kind of confused scratching our heads
like, "Okay."
So like just another day in New York
like something bad happened.
We were all kind of jaded kids, you know.
But something felt different about the way that
the adults were reacting to this,
and we were all kind of just like looking around.
Well, ding, the elevator opens up
and our chemistry teacher comes out
because her husband works at the World Trade Center.
And the second plane hit.
"This is very, very serious.
"Everybody stay here.
"You cannot leave the building
"until you've contacted your parents,
"and that somebody in your family comes
"to get you physically from our school."
Everyone was really kind of terrified.
I'm actually getting like...
It's like 98 degrees
and I'm getting goosebumps talking about this right now
all over my body.
Then, ding, another elevator comes out.
And then all of a sudden they say the Pentagon was hit.
And that was when a wave of terror floated above all of us
and we were like so scared for our lives at that point.
I don't think that anyone's life was ever the same
after that elevator opened.
And I remember exactly the look on the person's face
that delivered it.
The woman, the chemistry teacher,
she was very, very pregnant.
It was real deal.
I mean it was a real moment there.
We had to go to class
because they just felt like,
well, the bell rang,
so everybody just go to your classes
as long as you stay in until someone comes to get you.
Just stay here until someone comes to get you.
Our next class was history.
It was like US history.
Terrorism was like part of the syllabus
and it was like upcoming,
and we were going over the syllabus that day.
And we were like scratching our heads
'cause we were like,
"How are we even supposed to talk about anything
"as this is happening like 40 blocks down?"
We were all just so terrified.
And in this state of just disbelief in that moment.
It was almost like we were in the Twilight zone.
I got a call,
and I was called to the office to talk on the phone,
a landline.
And it was my dad.
And he was calling from Connecticut.
And he said, "Christy."
Now my dad had sort of like a political law background,
but more importantly, my dad was resourceful.
Now my dad told me on the phone,
"Christy, what I'm most concerned about right now is riots.
"What I'm most concerned about is people disappearing
"and people getting injured and hurt,
"and more acts of terrorism that could be happening."
Now, this is really happening to me.
This isn't like a TV show.
This isn't like something you write down on paper
and then act out.
For me in my little mind,
this is blowing in.
My dad's on the phone with me,
I'm kind of shaking
and he's like, "Your sister," okay?
So my sister at the time was getting taken and walked with
by this guy who my dad knew who was a big, tough guy
from all the way down in NYU.
So she walks like 40 blocks just to get to me.
I'm super happy to see her.
It was a really amazing thing
that she could do for me, right?
But we were family
and we just so happen to all be in Manhattan at the time.
We were supposed to take the train home.
That's how I got in that morning, right?
Obviously, the subways were shut down,
everything was shut down.
My dad said, "You need to walk with your sister
"to grand central station and get on the first train out.
"I don't care where it's going.
"Get on the first train out."
As we're walking there, we're hearing sirens.
We're hearing helicopters and more sirens and more sirens.
It's not mayhem on the street oddly enough.
It was really just kinda like quiet,
but like very eerily quiet.
So we walked and I think I was just so traumatized
that even if it had been mayhem on the street,
I wouldn't have noticed.
So now we're there.
And we're hoping and praying that
they will let us on one of these trains.
There was a train that was going home and it was a local.
They made sure that every single stop
on any of the trains going out
was gonna be hit so that somebody could get off.
There was no express trains.
Everything was a very different schedule that day.
We get on to the train,
we find a seat, it's packed,
people are standing.
There's a lot of people on that train
and we'll never ever forget this,
that were covered in ash.
I got home home,
and my mom and dad were happy to see us, obviously,
but I didn't know what to do.
I was so drained that I just went to my room
and I tried to create a song.
I actually did try to song write.
And it was bad, it was bad song
and I don't even remember what the song sounded like,
but that's how I chose to try
to deal with that pain that day,
was I tried to write a song.
Trauma, when you have it at this level,
weirdly enough, everyone was experiencing it kind of like
what we're dealing with right now in the pandemic.
Finding a way to cope with the trauma is so necessary.
For me in that moment,
that's what I chose to do,
was to write a little song or to try to write a song.
So here is what happened after that.
So I had to get back to California
(snaps fingers) real quick.
I was already sorta not comfortable flying.
So talk about somebody who doesn't want to fly,
that was me.
I legitimately was like, "Nope, I'm not flying.
"I don't know how we're going to get to California,
"but I'm not flying."
And my parents too they were like,
"Of course."
Nobody was flying.
My mom said, "We gotta get back to California.
"How are we gonna do this?"
So they racked their brains
and we did a train, Amtrak train,
all the way from New Haven, Connecticut
to Hollywood, California, wherever we lived.
That was crazy,
but let me tell you something else.
There is something super cathartic about going on a train.
There was a freedom.
There was a sense of like escapism
that you're safe on a train.
I got to see America on a train
and it changed my whole perspective.
I went from being the type of person
that called them flyover states to being an American.
That meant a lot to me.
By the time I got to California,
Disney had asked me to do a promotional thing
that addressed 9/11,
and I thought that was really big of them.
And they did include me in that campaign
and it was really about being an American, I think,
that they were trying to promote,
or at least some unity.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I recently got asked by a journalist
to reflect upon this moment in my life
and I was happy to share this experience
because I do think that a lot of us are going through
a shared trauma once again.
And on the 20th, I don't want to call it an anniversary,
but that's exactly what it is, of 9/11,
we are once again brought together
for an unfortunate reason.
At the end of the day,
I really do hope that people can be united.
Comment sections can become echo chambers,
but everyone as a person behind their username,
whether you're a troll or supporter,
you can choose to be either one of those things in life.
It's good to be a supporter.
It's good to be a part of the solution and not the problem.
It's good to just provide solutions, period.
If you just comment or do something
and it's like negative,
are you really doing anything
for the better good of humankind?
Probably not.
So, I urge you to do something good for someone today
and especially on 9/11 because we need more kindness.
And we need more support as Americans.
We need to support each other right now.
That's all I have to say.
(upbeat music)