Uncertainty

A good portion of my adult life has brought me face to face with extremely uncertain times.

I was 17 and just started my freshman year of college when Sept. 11th occured. I remember sitting in the lobby of my dorm with about 100 other students watching everything unfold on TV wondering if the United States was about to go "up in flames". Never had I experienced a feeling like that. Never again do I want to feel that way. I cry anytime I see footage of that day.

I was at home on a Saturday morning in February 2003. I turned on my TV when I woke up and the news was on and they were showing what looked like a flaming streak in the sky. Apparently I had turned on the TV in a lull in dialogue because it took what seemed like eternity for them to reiterate that what I was seeing was the space shuttle, Columbia. I thought it was a nuclear missile... not that I knew what that would look like, but I definitely thought it was something bad.

I was 19 when we "declared war", and I remember thinking "What does being at war mean? Are there going to be more attacks? Should I expect combat on my home soil? Am I safe?" All I had to reference was what I read in my history books about WWII and the Vietnam war. I had no idea what "being at war" meant.

My first half of my 20's were pretty stable in the grand scheme of things. Nothing as mind altering as the aforementioned, but then again I was away at college and I lived in my own world. *sheepish grin*

The first 2+ years of "real life" has been wonderful! I have a wonderful job; fulfilling, pays well, great job security. Then the Dow started slipping and I could see/hear the worry in my dad's face. A lot of my family's money is in the stock market. On a good day last year (while still in the 10000+ range) the Dow lost 100 pts and my dad said that that loss equated to about $100K lost for the family. Umm, wow. I didn't need to know that. I made the mistake of looking at my quarterly report for my 403b in December and found out that I lost over 1/3 of my contributions.

At 25, I am now experiencing the effects of a recession. It's extremely frightening for me to see how quickly everything seems to be falling apart. I've lived almost all of my life (as an aware member of society) in pretty prevalent economic times, so seeing the opposite of this is causing me to ask a lot of questions again. Is my job safe? Will my family be OK? Are we headed for another "Great Depression"??

Uncertain times bring up a lot of questions for me. Unfortunately most of them cannot be answered!