IT’S rare when we find ourselves as the right person in the right place at the right time. More often, it’s an unsatisfying mix of those and other variables: The place is right, the timing is spot on — only you were off.

I was 22 years old, and one day into an internship at the ABC program “Nightline,” when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. They woke this country up from the slumber of the 1990s, and in my case, from a jet-lagged coma in a corporate housing unit down the street from the Pentagon. In a week, I went from a sheltered college existence to having ash on the balcony from the smoldering crash site nearby.

My fellow interns and I soon realized we weren’t ready for the real world to introduce itself so cataclysmically. A White House intern friend, exhausted by the unending hours of TV coverage, marched to the video store one night, bought a VHS copy of the movie “Notting Hill” and proceeded to wear it out with almost nightly viewings. I went in the other direction and consumed hours of news coverage, studying what occurred from every angle, as if I were still cramming for a final exam I needed to ace.

It will forever be a dark time for this country. It was also a terrible time in American history to look or appear even remotely Muslim. A Pakistani-American colleague stopped wearing a prayer ring — given to her by her grandmother — that had Arabic script on it because she got suspicious looks on the subway.