Do I have time to grab my bag? Do I have time to grab my bag, I wondered urgently at the Capitol complex, a moment after being alerted, wrongly, that we had just been bombed blocks away. It was no time to think about homework, but I grabbed my backpack and ran.

It was only my second day, interning, but I was grateful to recognize a Secret Service agent, once I made it down several flights of stairs and outside, who had seemed very kind on day one; and I thought I would be safest sticking close to him. But, after we jogged down the street together awhile, he stopped suddenly, listened intently to his earpiece and darted in the opposite direction without explanation. I kept running away from the Capitol.

Just a few weeks earlier, I’d gone for my birthday to sbarro’s on top of the World Trade Center – probably my favorite spot in the world at that time. But I spent much of this day sitting on the apartment floor of one of my new mentors in Congressman Hoyer’s office, watching it on television.

It was only after making my way to Union Station, across town underground to my car, beyond the Pentagon over a long drive, and back to my dorm room that it all began to sink in. Like everyone, I sobbed. (Even today, seeing that word and that number together on my phone, on a schedule, like it could ever be normal, is a hurtful, but still valued, reminder.)

Everything changed for me that day, before which, I don’t think I had ever even considered journalism as a worthwhile career path. Afterward, it got clear.

In keeping with the theme of this blog, I do not think I ever imagined I would need to worry about real danger of any kind, working in journalism. But it has been difficult not to consider again how jarring my departure from CNN still feels today given how hopeful and purpose-filled my beginning years there had felt and, indeed, were. I know almost nothing about the experiences of women living within blocks of me, let alone on the other side of the world; but it still seemed important to say again what a difference it makes to live and work in the safety of an environment in which human rights, including women’s rights, are valued. So much, including relationships with those who before had seemed reliable, can change overnight absent an environment upholding such values.

Remembering September 11 hurts, deeply and personally, like a badly bruised organ. But it is more than that – it is a hurt so large and dark and seemingly unbearable, it feels like someone else’s. It is galvanizing. Still, my heart is filled to the brim today with a sense almost only of the sacrifice, goodness, and irreplaceable value of the American lives lost twenty years ago. I am particularly moved, like many people, by the daring work of the passengers and crew of Flight 93 who knew (they knew) they were not fighting for themselves. My God. And the firefighters who, with every step taken toward, not away from, up, and not down, in order to preserve life in the face of murderers, left us all an undeserved but undeniable legacy. We know the purity and goodness of their love and that it was extended. To hear about very young people today who have no memory of that day is bizarre. Don’t they know it catalyzed so many of our careers, I wonder? Don’t they know it alerted us to a need to heal many of the problems we still seek to solve? Don’t they know that’s what we’re all doing?

During a time when it has felt important to discuss injustices that seem to have often been perpetrated largely by men in the absence of robust systems of accountability, it is humbling and essential to remember these examples of real manhood. I believe many today would change the course of their lives again any day of the week in response to the goodness modeled by any one of their loving, gorgeous hearts.

The world’s loss that day is just as heavy a hurt and a responsibility today. Truly, it still feels like yesterday; and I believe we must not only continue to remember, but to hold on like hell to the baton that was handed to us in trust and in love.