20 years ago to the day I remember vividly the moment I became aware of the events unfolding in Manhattan. At 12 years old I was in the early years of high school, and it was quarter past 3 in the afternoon in the UK. I'd arrived home and put my bike against the garage before peering in through the window to say hi to my Mum who was usually always busy doing something on any normal day, but she was on the edge of the sofa pointing and telling me to look at the TV screen. For the next few minutes I just stared in silence through the glass. By this time the second tower was billowing smoke and those images would only get worse as I eventually made my way inside. At such a young age I was incredibly impressionable, having grown up on American media during the 90's it felt personal despite being more than three thousand miles away. As the events unfolded, whether I liked it or not an anger boiled up inside me that I couldn't quite explain. Having a comfortable, trauma-free upbringing in a place that never brought any struggles I had no reason to hold any social grudges or retaliate against anything that threatened my way of life. Suddenly that changed not only in me but in my friends and those around me. Two decades on, I am sceptical as to whether or not my reaction was a natural one. Whether or not it was sculpted by western media or exaggerated by our own personal background, we simply detested the idea of what had attacked us from afar. We became angry, and that anger would bubble away inside me for several years as a young teenager. The images on TV fairly quickly turned to the villainous footage of those identified as responsible for what happened in New York, and as young teenagers we felt as though there was a Muslim culture brewing on the other side of the world that threatened everything about what we previously felt was a safe future.

Unlike some people of my age around the country, I came from a predominantly non-multicultural background, so it was unfortunate that my first experience with this culture was a negative one. My hatred turned into curiosity and through no real intention I suddenly found myself getting full marks in religious studies classes concerning this 'new found' culture that was suddenly on the news and a topic of conversation wherever I went. In hindsight I realise these classes were more than likely put there to make us understand the culture so that we wouldn't automatically vilify it. Either way, September 11th 2001 stayed with me for many years. I remember creating an art piece I put together depicting the events alongside a written piece in memory of the victims, which my teachers decided should be spoken out in front of the entire year in the assembly hall. Not my calmest of moments, but looking back it was clear that should I have been 10 years older I'd have been the ideal recruit for the forces heading into the middle east. Those men were likely no different to me, but simply had the misfortune to be born earlier. They had the passion, the patriotism and the anger built up inside of them with the will to bring peace and normality back to our lives. We now know many of them never returned home, and only became statistics in a campaign that almost exactly 20 years on achieved very little. Unlike me, they never had two decades to come to terms with what happened that day and detach themselves from the outrage that our leaders fed to us in order to justify an unjustifiable war. Churned up into political motivation and sparking intense cultural divide. It's quite surreal to know how much time has passed since that day, and to reflect on how it impacted the world around us. 2,977 people will never get that luxury, but they will never be forgotten.