My name is also Gabrielle and I had a very similar experience.
I remember my mom waking me up for school and telling me something extremely important was going on. I was in 7th grade and it was 3 days before my birthday. Once I finally got out of bed I saw the footage of what had happened. I can’t remember if both planes had already hit. I walked away from the TV not thinking too much of it. My mom was driving for carpool that day so I was in the car with 2 of my neighbors. We were listening to to 102.7 KIIS FM with Rick Dees and I vividly remember hearing his voice describe the events. At that moment in time I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I heard the words “plane crash” and genuinely thought it could’ve been an accident. It was a very quiet car ride which was out of the ordinary to say the least. The only thing we did at school that day was watch the coverage. I went to a small private school with about 60 kids in my grade. A girl in my class named Erica was crying because she thought her dad was on one of the hijacked planes. There was confusion about the flight numbers for a while. There was so much general confusion that day. After school I went home and turned on MTV as usual but TRL wasn’t on. Instead it was news coverage of the attacks. I flipped the channel (from 49 to 50… i think it was VH1 at the time) and saw a message that normal programming had been suspended. I started realizing this was a bigger deal than I had thought. For the next few days it was hard to find anything else to watch on TV. 3 days later it was my birthday. We were still watching the news at school and everyone was sad and distracted. I remember wondering if my birthday was always going to be like this from now on. Watching this video today was the first time I’ve cried about 9/11. In high school I watched plenty of footage and I was more morbidly fascinated by it than I should have been. I feel terribly that when it happened I was more concerned with TV and my birthday and even in the aftermath I was more concerned with “Bush did 9/11” than I was with any of the victims or their families or the city of New York or our entire country. I know my comment will be buried but I just had to get this out.