🌊 The Threshold of 9/11 — The Identity That Burned and the Self That Lived

On the morning of 9/11,
I should have been in the office.

All of my paintings were there —
my entire early body of work,
years of creation,
everything I had not yet sold.

But that morning, I was headed down to the lobby.
A small change, a slight shift,
a decision without consequence…
a meeting that became the difference
between life and death.

When the towers fell,
my art — all of it —
gone.

And with it, the identity I had spent a decade building:

Artist.
New Yorker.
Sculptor.
Dreamer.
Young woman with a future shaped in paint, charcoal, and clay.

Gone.

People think reinvention begins with inspiration.
It doesn’t.

It begins with loss —
the kind of loss that leaves you standing in the rubble of your own life
asking questions that have no answers.

The kind of loss
that forces you to confront what you have never questioned:

What remains when everything I’ve built disappears?
Who am I if the world I created is taken from me?
Can I trust the Self enough to walk without a map?
What do I do with this life I now have — this gift called my life?
Do I really want what I thought I wanted?
The children? The lifestyle? The security?

These are not intellectual questions.
They are questions that collapse timelines.
Questions that strip you bare.
Questions that leave you with only one thing left:

Choice.

Not the identity-based choice of “What should I do?”
but the ontological choice of:

Can I choose what is already here?
What life has placed in front of me — right now?

Because only when we choose what is so
are we returned to the clearing —

the space where nothing binds us
and everything becomes possible.

And from that clearing,
for the first time,
I could ask:

Who can I be now?

It was in that ash-filled grief
that I discovered the most important threshold of my life.

There, I made the defining choice:

To complete the identity of “artist”
and step into the work of transformation —
not as a career,
but as a promise.

A promise to make a difference
for people who believed they had no choice.
For people whose past felt too heavy to carry.
For people standing in their own rubble
needing someone to hold the light
while they remembered themselves again.

A promise to guide people
through their own Threshold.

That decision — born from devastation —
became my greatest crossing.

9/11 may have taken my art.
But it returned me to my mission.

Sometimes the Self only steps forward
when everything that is not the Self
has been burned away.

With love and presence,
🌊 Gitanjali

Threshold Journeys
Where the inner crossings reveal the architecture of Becoming.

Leadership & Transformation Coach | Human Design Guide
Founder of Vision. Power. Presence.

If this spoke to you, share it with someone standing at their own threshold.
I write about leadership, identity, and Human Design — where transformation becomes art and reinvention becomes remembrance.

Image Credit: Gitanjali Koppikar, My Mother’s Sari, 2025