It has been ten years.  Ten long, often arduous years.  Most of those years have been filled with challenges, not just for me but for my country.  It’s been ten years and I can still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that Tuesday morning when the world changed.   I was the reason the wage tax office found out so soon.  It was my first temp job after college.  We normally watched the Today show and I asked if I could switch it.  I did and saw smoke coming out of one of the World Trade Center towers.  No one knew, at that point, what was going on and why on earth a plane (for that was the report) had hit the towers.  A tragic and terrible accident we all thought.  That is, of course, until the second plane hit the second tower.  I can remember watching shock as they show the plane hitting the tower.  It was no accident.  Who was doing this and why?  What else was going to happen?  Was it over?   They were talking to the Pentagon correspondent when the image shook and there were loud noises.  We saw that live.  It took a few minutes to discover that the Pentagon had been hit by a plane as well.  Reports were going out that many planes – 16, 11, etc. – were unaccounted for.  The network was reporting rumors and no one had a clue.  My memory loses track of the order of events.  I know that there was news of a plane crash in Shanksville, PA near Stoystown and Jennerstown.  I went to summer church camp near Stoystown and Jennerstown.  I didn’t understand that.  We knew by then it was terrorists, but I knew there was nothing in that area that could be considered a target.  It was mostly farm country and small towns.  I don’t know if they were looking at the first tower live when it happened, but I remember watching it fall.  I know the cameras were showing a live feed when the second tower fell.  Thousands were dead.  I knew it.  I can remember seeing images of dust and smoke and hearing the horrible sound of firefighter locators.  Well, the sound is horrible to me now.  I can’t hear it without going back to those scenes.  I don’t think we got any work done that day.  I don’t remember when the news came out about the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93, but I can remember admiring them.  They knew they were all dead and they were the first of us to fight the war on terror.  I think they were the ones who gave many courage and hope that we (and by we I mean ordinary people) all could do something to make a difference and save lives when the time came.  It saddens me to know that their memorial is not fully funded.  I also admire the first responders who went into that very dangerous situation to try to save lives.  They did save many people, but many of them lost their lives as well.  I’ve always known that they have a courage and compassion that I lack.  I admire them, but truly it was the passengers on that doomed plane who defeated the terrorists who gave me the hope that in that type of situation that I could do something to make a difference.

The overwhelming support shown by the entire country can still make me smile.  All the people who traveled both great and small distances to help New York and DC recover and rebuild.  The money that was raised for the families of the victims.  I can remember a business owner who worked in the Towers who was late that day because he was taking his child to school coming on the air and promising to give money to the families of his employees.  I don’t recall his name, but I do hope he kept that promise.  I can remember the emotions of the President and the other political leaders and all the events held to raise money to help.   We didn’t break, we got back up, and today we still stand as a proud nation.

I know that it saddens me to know that there are those who believe that the whole thing was a sham.  That our government did it intentionally.  Were things missed leading up to it? Yes.  Are those misses more glaringly obvious after the fact than before the attack?  Most definitely.  No one I know had ever considered that a jet plane would be used as a bomb instead of as someplace to get hostages.  It seems obvious now, but not then.  I was old enough then to know and remember and the common man just did not consider that.  I can not speak for the terrorists and Al Qaeda who obviously did think of it nor for the people who were employed to stop terrorism since I did not know any at the time.  I think it is a real credit to our leaders, our intelligence agencies, and our military that in the past ten years we have not had another major terrorist attack on our soil and I certainly pray that the rest of the day goes by without incident.  It is also a credit to our allies who have assisted us – many of whom have also suffered from terrorist attacks in the past ten years.  It is a battle, I know, between law enforcement and terrorists to see who can win each day and I pray that each day law enforcement wins.  Killing people may get attention to a cause, but it leaves holes in many lives.  One day another terrorist may try something similar to the attacks on September 11th and my sister or my brother-in-law might just be flying the plane or be a passenger on the plane.  I know they both would fight but as little as I see them I don’t want to lose them.  No longer will the majority of pilots and crew co-operate with terrorists since we now know that hostages and negotiations are not the number one uses for planes.  We have  the memories of the brave people on Flight 93 to thank for that.  One of my favorite songs is “One Last Time” by Dusty Drake:

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I wish I could say that I feel alone without fearing people jumping all over me for it. I am alone. I may have friends, but they’re not up when I get home from work. I don’t have people to talk to. I don’t have someone I can call in the middle of the night. People are busy. People don’t have things in common with me. Unfortunately, I don’t really have things to talk about with my friends. I don’t have children to talk about. I don’t have a husband/boyfriend/fiance to talk about. I don’t have a career. Most of the time I feel like a failure and/or a disappointment.

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Well, I need to go to sleep, but I’m very thirsty so while I drink something, I’m doing a quick post. I have to get up early to go see my psychiatrist for a half hour appointment. I have no clue as to why she wants to see me for a half hour but it’s very inconvenient. I’m still trying to figure out when I need to set my alarm for. I don’t know what she’s going to say. I haven’t take anything type of psychiatric drug since a week after I saw her last. I’m fairly confident there is no Wellbutrin in my system. She told me it had a short half life and would be gone quickly. I was not taking a therapeutic level dose when I stopped the Lamictal so it really makes no difference if it is in my system or not. I don’t know if she’s going to give me a hard time or not. I hope not. And can I say that I hope that there is OT in the morning or else I’m going to be highly irritated and quite bored for a good period of time.

Not long after I finally broke up with Tom, he told me basically that his life was over.  He’d never find someone  to love and he’d spend all his life working.  Really, I wanted to smack him.  I knew he was basically full of it.  He wasn’t the one with a mental disorder that most people, especially men, didn’t understand.  He didn’t have something wrong with him that half the world didn’t even accept as being real.  He wasn’t the one who had mutual friends of ours mad at him for breaking the relationship.  He wasn’t the one who was now broke, who had had another guy come along and take all he could get for as long as he could get.  He hadn’t just watched someone become an ex and be better off when they were when the relationship started while he was worse off.  No that was all me.

Now I’ve found out via Facebook that he’s dating someone new.  He’ll be with her until she breaks off the relationship because he never will no matter how bad things are.  He never has broken up with anyone.   I resent the fact that he was so much better off when we broke and I will be paying for it for years and now he has someone new, while I sitting knowing that no one is going to ever want me.  No one will put up with the difficulties.  It will be about three years before I’m out of debt and I’m not going to date someone before that.  It ends up being to damn expensive.  Maybe if I was happy or joyful or content, but I’m not.  I live on a roller coaster that I wish I could get off but don’t think I ever will.  I live with pain that I am told has no cause but oftentimes limits what I can and cannot do.  I have to learn how to live with it and I don’t know how I’m going to do it.

As most of you know, I’ve been having a lot of problems with medications. Over the past three years, I have steadily gone off most of the medications I was on. It began one night I ran out of the anti-anxiety medication and since I was already through the withdrawal before was able to renew it, I decided to see how I did without it. When the withdrawal was over with, I no longer had anxiety symptoms. I had no more anxiety attacks and and have not since March 2 years ago. At that point, I decided that it might be worthwhile to see which other medications I may not need to be on. Luckily, I was with the new psychiatrist although when she first found out that I was off of most of my medication on my own she thought I was crazy.  As it turns out, I wasn’t.

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I’m not sure how I did it – today was rough. It started out with no OT then I had to deal with the idiots at HR Workways. I just didn’t want to go to work. I didn’t want to but I have bills to pay so off to work I went. Nothing terribly exciting on the ride there, but I did notice that there were not a lot of cars in the parking lot and when the van go there a bunch of people from Header daylight got out so they had gotten VTO. I got to work and realized that I had left the Nook at home which meant I had nothing to read. Got upstairs and looked at the header, OE and pharmacist schedules and sure enough daylight on all three had received VTO. You can tell just by looking. I’m working along and today, just like yesterday, the radio signal was horrible. Then about 3:15 pm (1 hour and 15 minutes into my 10 hour shift) one of the sups announces an interest list for VTO for all of OE. I didn’t sign up. I had no clue when I would leave if I took it. By 3:30 pm it had been approved. So before my first break of the day I could have left for the day. I didn’t know what to do so I called Mom and it was short and unpleasant. I won’t be calling her at work again unless I’m dying. I didn’t leave. Worked, had lunched, listened to the Pens game. I was able to download the Penguins official app and stream the game over the phone so I could actually hear most of it. there were 2 downsides to this – one was that the volume varied greatly from commercial to game and even from commercial to commercial. The second was that after so long the radio would shut off. But considering that I could hear it clearly, it was worth it. The Pens tied it and went into overtime where they lost in the last 4 seconds of the period. I stayed at work. I didn’t really have any reason to leave, even if my arm, elbow, wrist, hand and finger did hurt, if Mom didn’t really want me around. After all, the only thing I’m actually good for is working. I spent most of the day fighting off tears and just wanting to set my head down and sob. I didn’t. I kept working. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to my favorite host on The Fan. I just couldn’t. I listened to my iPod. Left late actually, since I was in the middle of a complicated order. Only by 1 minute, though. Get into the van and realized that my favorite van driver didn’t have any clue that my shift was over at 12:30 am or that there was VTO and therefore no OT meaning I wasn’t going to be staying late. Nor did he realize that when I work OT I work 2 hours post shift unless the weather is bad or there is no work to do. I’ve only been doing this for over a year now. Not to mention that except for last week, I never work OT Wednesday nights. *shrug* Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Drove home. All of my music stations were depressing – even KLove. So I spent the entire ride home flipping channels and trying not to cry. So I’m home, I hurt, I’m not exactly eating terrifically, I still want to cry and I’m going to go to sleep. I’m useless and worthless and wish I could just curl up into a ball and stay there. I can’t. I have to get up and go to work tomorrow. I’m feeling (emotionally) worse and worse this week and the lessens any chance of me doing anything. Not that it matters since I’ll be the only one who’s really suffering.  You have no idea how much right now I don’t want to go on.  I will because I have to and that’s basically the only reason why.

by LJ user velociraptorx at the wickpixgraphics community

I haven’t been posting because I’ve been scared.  I don’t have a lot of contact with people in the first place and I’m afraid anything I say will irritate at the least one or more of my friends.  I’m scared, I’m alone, and since lowering the med my depression is getting worse.  No more hot flashes and I no longer feel like I’m dying at work most of the time, but I spend more time wanting to cry.  Just looking at my top posts on my news feed on Facebook was depressing.  So many of them were about my friends and their families and lives.  They all seem to have something going on – some reason to keep going on while I’m wondering why I keep going.  Go to work to pay the bills for expenses incurred I’ll never be reimbursed for then come home, play FarmVille & Mousehunt, and go to sleep.  I’ve read no blogs that aren’t sports blogs for quite a while now.  I haven’t seen anyone all year (other than my parents) and each week it gets harder. I do not want to bring people down and I also know people don’t want to be around someone who feels depressed.  Not to mention that people always want a reason. Even my father who has seen me deal with depression for over 10 years now wants reasons why I’m depressed.  It doesn’t always work that way!  Sometimes (a lot of the time these days) I just feel down then things come along that make the downness worse.  I don’t tend to tell people what those things are because people take it the wrong way.  They seem to think that because I’m down and jealous that I don’t want them to be happy, do things, have lives, or hear about it, which isn’t true.  People don’t understand why it hurts and if I try to explain I’m just wrong.  I get sick of arguing.    Right now I do not have hope. I do not have a great future in store.  I do not see any way in which God could possibly use me.  Once my parents are gone I will not have anyone close to me.  And don’t suggest either of my sisters – I haven’t heard from them in months and I know I won’t hear from D until my birthday unless we happen to run into each other at Mom’s or she needs something from me.  The only thing I can do is type and complain.  I’m doing both those things rather well at times.  Oh yeah, and read.  If I’m reading a book (let’s specify a fictional story) then I’m not feeling or thinking things.  I have very little use or purpose and certainly nothing that someone else couldn’t do, some even a bit better.  I get up and go to work every day because I have to. I have no other choice and I have no reason not to.  *shrug*  My dad was telling me the other day that I shouldn’t be down because I don’t know what might be around the corner.  The last 2 corners I took left me riddled with debt because I was too generous and in some cases badly used.  I guess I should be happy that I have this job which makes it so that I can afford to pay my bills but it’s hard when people don’t want to talk to you but you see them talking to other people on the floor and when you’re cleaning off your car with weak wrists then driving home for over an hour on badly treated roads.  At least I like what I do and get to actually use my problem solving skills – when I’m not grumbling about stupid doctors & their staffs, patients, and fellow employees.

by LiveJournal user xbelladollx

I know I haven’t been around. I’ve been feeling quite ill for last quarter last year and all this year so far.  It may be the medication that I raised just before I started feeling ill, so I’m stepping back down.  I really hope this does it. My doctor said she had another patient who had similar reaction to the same medication.  It’s not going to be easy – it’s my depression medication.  Not only may my depression increase, but I’ll be paranoid about it and may even withdraw even more, if that’s possible.  You have no idea how afraid I am of being condemned and/or hated.

Some of my friends have been talking about spousal abuse – they both went through it and got out.  They just did a post and someone made a nasty comment and there is a good chance it’s someone who I feel got to them through me.  I’d written a long, drawn out blog post (because do I do any other kind?) about what I thought I had gone through but haven’t had the courage to post it.  I have a pretty good idea that I came close to getting into the same situation as they did, but there were 2 different things – one is that I got out before it got violent and two that getting into it and staying in it so long was my own stupid fault.  I wrote about that situation and some other things that were mixed up in it – but I haven’t posted it.  It’s sitting in a file on my desktop and has for days.  I don’t know if I can or should post it.  I don’t think I could take any more condemnation than I already put on myself and I’m afraid that people would hate and scorn me and I’d lose what little I do have.  I can’t really see how anyone could have anything other than contempt for me upon reading it so it stays unposted.  I also don’t think people would believe me.  I’ve told parts of it to some different people and they didn’t.  I was weak and stupid and I am very afraid to reveal that anyone.  Although, I’m really not sure anyone could hate me, be ashamed of me, or look down on me any more than I do.  I don’t really want to find out.  I don’t know if I ever will.  I’m also concerned because I have a feeling that if certain people read parts of it they would be hurt and/or be angry with me.  I’m really not sure I could take that. *shrug* I might do it anyways.

By Livejournal user italic of Bouncys!

I hate being cold and it being late (or early, depending on your view of the world). The silence is deafening. Well, Kit is eating at the moment. It makes me think about how this is going to be my life. In a time far too short for me, I will have no one who I can truly be myself around. I guess it’s my own fault. Terry and Tom taught me one very important thing – people, men especially, cannot deal with my depression full time. I can still hear the words in my head and I don’t think they’ll ever go away. *shrug* I’m also selfish. One of the reasons I ended things with Tom is that I got sick and tired of taking care of him all the time. I hated being responsible for everything. Paying bills, doing laundry, buying food not only for me but also for him to take on the road, buying clothes for him, and so on. I felt like it was all on me and when it got to the point where I was having to work tons of OT to pay all the bills on my own I was fed up. Especially since I was practically as alone as I am now. No, actually I was more alone. I see Mom a lot more than I ever saw him. Now I’m working to pay all the bills left over from me taking care of him. It hurts. It truly hurts. And I still have to encourage him and tell him he’s not a bad person and tell him not to do things which would be bad for him that he was on the verge of doing. It doesn’t end. At least I’m not afraid of being alone and willing to be in a bad relationship just so that I am with someone like he is. I may not look forward to it, I may dread it, but I’m not going to anything rash to make sure it doesn’t happen. I also don’t want to have to share my nice, comfy bed. Sometimes I think my bed is my haven. My selfishness also one of the reasons I don’t want to have kids. I don’t think I could be a good enough mother because I don’t think I could handle having someone need me all the time. I know the day will come when I have to care for my mother and I think I can handle that. I hope so, anyways.

Is there some rule somewhere that states when you hit 31 your body goes crazy on you?  I have large dry and flaky areas on the side of my face in front of my ears on both sides, a little higher on my temple on the right side, and down on my neck on one of the sides.  My chin is breaking out – but that’s probably due to the fact that since my skin has been dry I haven’t been using my acne gel as much.  I got sick and have been feeling sick at work on a regular basis for weeks (but the latter might be the heat).  My stomach aches on a regular basis (every Sunday since my birthday). Now I’m having a period I shouldn’t be having at a time when I shouldn’t be having it!  Argh!! Facing definite back and possible abdominal cramps is not high on my agenda, but at least if it gets too bad I have vicodin to take.  Somebody shoot me!  Or turn back the clock!  The only thing that hasn’t been a major problem is my depression (which is odd) although when it gets to be late and I’m tired that tends to rear up as well. (Wednesday night was not good, but that’s another blog post.)