Written September 11, 2026. Twenty-five years later, and I still carry both halves of this story in the same breath.

I wasn’t sure I would ever write this down. Some memories feel too tender to hand to strangers on the internet. But as a Lebanese-American photographer, I have spent my whole life holding two truths that most people never have to reconcile at once. I think it’s time I stopped holding them quietly.

The Day Everything Stopped

I was in 5th grade at a new school in Maryland on September 11, 2001. We had just moved from Northern Virginia that summer. I was only two or three weeks into my new school year. I was still learning the names of my classmates, still finding my way to the cafeteria without getting turned around.

I remember sitting in social studies class when everything just stopped. My teacher rolled in a TV, and instead of our lesson, we watched the news. I didn’t understand what was happening, not really. I just knew something terrible was unfolding in New York City. The World Trade Center was falling, over and over, on every channel, like the world had gotten stuck.

My dad picked my brother and me up from school early that day. We went with him to work. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the bar at the restaurant where he worked. TVs surrounded us, each one playing a different station, all showing the same footage. One plane going down after another.

I was ten years old. I understood, in the way children understand things, that the ground had shifted somehow, even if I couldn’t name how.

The Unity I Witnessed on 9/12

I couldn’t grasp what this meant for our country. But I remember waking up the next morning, on September 12, and seeing something different. Americans coming together. Flags everywhere. Strangers helping strangers in a way I had never seen before and haven’t quite seen since.

In the weeks that followed, I emptied my lemonade stand money into an envelope. I gave it to the American Red Cross. I wanted to do something, anything, to help the people in New York who had lost so much. It wasn’t much. It was everything a ten year old had to give.

The fear I witnessed on 9/11 is something I will never forget. Neither is the hope and helpfulness I witnessed on 9/12, and in the days and weeks after. They live side by side in my memory of that time. For years, that was the only version of this story I let myself tell.

The Weight I Carried as a Lebanese-American Kid

Here is the part I don’t tell as often.

That same year, I experienced racism for the first time in my life. I am Lebanese-American. In the months that followed 9/11, people bullied me for it. Classmates called me a “terrorist,” day after day. Kids who didn’t know any better, or maybe just needed somewhere to put their fear. I was ten years old, already learning what it felt like when people blamed me for something. Something I had nothing to do with. All because of the blood in my veins.

I remember a teacher calling on me in class to point out Lebanon on a map. I genuinely didn’t know where it was. I hadn’t needed to know. All I knew was that Lebanon was my happy place. A place filled with love, family, and joyful memories. Nothing like the image my peers placed onto me. An image that had nothing to do with the country I actually knew.

I carried that confusion for a long time. How could the place that held so much love for me become the same word people used to hurt me?

Holding Both Truths, Twenty-Five Years Later

I remember Americans coming together in unity after tragedy. I also remember a divide, a fear people directed at anyone who looked Middle Eastern. I lived inside that fear as a child too young to defend myself against it.

Both of these memories are true. They happened in the same year, sometimes the same week, sometimes even the same day. Twenty-five years later, I still hold both of them. The unity and the division. The helpfulness and the hate. I have stopped trying to make one of them cancel the other out.

This Is Why I Tell This Story

That ten year old version of me couldn’t find Lebanon on a map. But she knew exactly how much that place loved her. She’s still the reason I do what I do.

It’s part of why I believe so deeply in something simple. Every person, every identity, and every love story deserves full visibility and celebration, without condition. It’s why inclusivity isn’t a line on my website. It’s something I carry in my bones, long before I ever picked up a camera and started Jennifer Mary Collective.

This is the 9/11 Lebanese American story I’ll keep telling, every year, on this day. Not because it’s easy. Because silence never protected me at ten years old. And it won’t stop someone from calling the next kid something they aren’t either.