I'm still traveling through a rough spot here and trying to remain intact.

I have somehow become withdrawn, which I guess serves it's purpose but I think is not popular with my friends or associates. I just...can't...get it up.

I never feel like going out or seeing anyone anymore, instead I find myself puttering around my apartment or this city. Taking different routes home, seeking quiet, little traveled streets to walk.

I have become very anxious during the day, which transcends to teeth grinding at night and headaches when I wake up.

I find that I have very little patience for people who make my life difficult and I tell them so now. Sometimes at work, I become enraged and have to leave my office for a moment so as not to lash out.

Little things anger me, people who ask my counsel and then question it. People who dwell on minute details. I used to be able to temper these things, to take them in stride and win them over but I find that I no longer have the patience for this anymore and that frustrates me, because it was one of my prized traits.

I have expressed my unhappiness about my quality of life at work, my desire for change and in some ways, my plans to seek a new life away from NYC.

My work is understanding of my needs and I will be transitioning to a four-day work week for the summer.

For some reason this news made me cry a bit, somewhat because I feel like I've let them down, like I was their teflon girl and now they see I am made of dented tin. It also provided me with relief.

I am overwhelmed with life right now. I am working through a case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Just another statistic in this city filled with people going through the same damn thing. The news here is filled with reports that the city can't staff enough trained counselors to deal with this crisis.

I find myself, like a crazy person, consumed with predicting the next target and rearranging my travel routes and plans to avoid it.

I look at people in my apartment building and I wonder if behind closed doors that have blueprints of landmarks and high traffic areas and vials of explosives.

I know this is crazy. I know it. I know that continually switching from subway to bus to walking to taxi thinking that I will outfool them is crazy.

But I am not alone. My friend A. spends his day testing other predictations with me until today, when I finally blew up and said, "Why would you say such thing?!" and he responded, "I just want them to attack. I can't take this waiting for the next strike."

None of us can take it.

We came to New York because it was a challenge. The song said, "If we could make it here, we could make it anywhere." And the song was right for a while. We competed against driven, intelligent competitors. The best and the brightest. We managed skyrocketing rents and demanding high pressure jobs but it was worth it because we were the machination of the world economy. We set the trends for fashion, we concocted the cocktails the country wanted to drink, we owned the World Series and we were the home of news bureaus and pop culture talk television. We had it all because we were a city of ambitious people who worked for it, regardless of the cost to our personal lives.

And then one day, there were less of us. We took a hit and speaking for myself, we vowed not to let the enemies of the lives we worked so hard to obtain, win.

We grieved and we went back to work. I worked harder. I wanted to make this life work even better than before because I am not a defeatist.

In some superhuman way, I wanted to set an example of strength for an America that seemed to be reeling harder than those of us at the core of the disaster.

But one day, I woke up scared. I started to look over my shoulder like a crazy person. I started crying in the mornings, just from reading the New York Post.

Me, of all people, that's what I don't understand. Me, who hyperventilates at the thought of a shark attack but nevertheless forces myself into the ocean every weekend in the summer to prove to myself that I can't be psyched out. Me, a college graduate. Me, who traveled alone through Europe for 4 weeks after losing my purse and all of my money. Me, who rode the bus 2 1/2 hours every day for weeks to get to this city and pounded the pavement to find my first job here. Me, who lived alone at the YMCA for a month until I could find an apartment I could afford.

How could I, be terrorized? When did I become so weak?

It's not just me. There are others of us. There are legions. A city of the best and the brightest functioning under the thumb of fear.

I know there are others. They walk among me each morning and evening. They read the same news reports. They cry next to me in Spiderman, partly from the scenes of destruction in New York that are now too real, but also because they sit in the darkened movie theater around me and silently question if we will all be bombed in this theater, sitting in dark with a group of strangers. Maybe like me, they harbor a secret fantastical hope that a modern day Spiderman can save us from our real life foes; that one man with a secret identity can spin a web to capture faceless Egyptians who snuck here in the cargo hold of a foreign vessel.

In all of my efforts to help save the global economy and business, I never once stopped to think about how to save myself.

Right now, that's all I think about.

This is my perspective of what the news media calls, The Post 9/11 World.

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