School finished and I got into my ma's waiting car. I asked if she could drop me off in town to go to my part-time job; she didn't approve of me working there, and we argued. As we waited for the girls that carpooled with us, she told me that she'd heard about a Plane flying into the World Trade Center in New York. I shrugged. In my youthful English ignorance, I'd never heard of the place, and if I'd not heard of it, it couldn't be that important, could it? An image formed in my mind of an old man falling asleep in the cockpit of a Cessna and managing to break a few windows on a skyscraper.

Ma relented on the work argument, and half an hour later I was at the office. I worked part-time after school and at weekends as a door canvasser for a shady double glazing company, which essentially meant having doors slammed in my face for commission (no basic). "Exploitation" was a word that didn't occur to me until much later. My team had already left for the evening shift by the time I got there, thanks to my mother's remonstrations, but this didn't bother me. Soul-crushing as the job was, my purpose there was not to earn money or gain valuable work experience. I simply preferred being made to feel like shit by strangers in other towns, rather than by my family at home. It was an experience that would end, like almost everything at that point in my life, in disaster.

I was in no rush to get home. Someone had a radio on, buzzing with news about the plane crash Ma had mentioned. Apparently it was more serious than she'd realised - some people had been killed. Neither I nor anyone else in the office reacted to it. Even if the extent of the situation had been apparent at that moment, this was not the sort of workplace to react accordingly to major news events. The size of the plane expanded in my mind's eye, but that was all.

I talked my boss into giving me a bus fare home. An hour or so later, I walked into my bedroom, tossed my bag onto the bed, turned on the TV - and watched as all hell broke loose.

Although the enormity of those scenes took me a few days to truly realise, my first thoughts were of a psychology class I'd been in not forty-eight hours earlier. I was mere days into sixth form and A-level classes, and my first psychology lessons revolved around the psychology of memory. I remembered my tutor saying that our next lesson, scheduled for the next day, would revolve around the concept of flashbulb memory. You know how you remember where you were and what you were doing in near-exact detail when something of huge importance happens? That's a flashbulb memory, and this would become a flashbulb memory on a global scale - the term "9/11" to become as evocative as "Challenger", "Diana" or "JFK". Dully, I wondered if this was some heinous cosmic joke intended to make me pass A-level psychology.

The next day, I wore a red hoodie emblazoned with "NEW YORK" in large white capitals, and a stars-and-stripes bandana over my bunches. I hadn't bought these items in order to profess my love of the United States, but it seemed appropriate to show solidarity; I recall that my guitar teacher approved of this. My psychology tutor commented that it would be a long while before the truth of the situation would be found, before launching into Brown and Kulik (1977). (Incidentally, 9/11 would do nothing to improve my psychology grade. I failed the coursework and barely scraped a pass.) School was pervaded with a sense that something great and terrible had happened, but we were teenage girls, thousands of miles away from these events and their consequences, with entirely different mindsets and agendas. Politics wasn't high on the list of conversation topics in the canteen.

Looking back on the days, months and years that followed, it was one hell of a political awakening. On September 11th 2001, I was a nearly-seventeen-year-old with no interest whatsoever in the nonsense a bunch of suits spouted from their leather seats in London - just a vague sense that none of them was to be trusted. One teacher's earlier suggestion that I should become a politician based upon my excellent debating skills was met with distaste.

Then our country went to war in Afghanistan, which I could almost understand, and in Iraq, which I couldn't at all. I came to see Bush as a playground bully whose idiocy was only matched by his outright evil, and Blair not so much as a prime minister rather than a presidential yes-man. I began to wonder why we British were leaping on the American bandwagon, when this appeared to have very little to do with us.

And this was all before I discovered the likes of Michael Moore, Alex Jones and Peter Joseph, to name but a few.

Ten years on, I feel as though the damage caused by the "war on terror" will never cease to cascade onto innocent citizens. My vague mistrust of politicians on both domestic and global levels has fully bloomed into loathing and skepticism. I believe that 9/11 was a false flag attack, orchestrated by the American government in order to assert dictatorship-like control over its patriots, to speed the slow erosion of democracy all over the Western world, and to perpetuate false wars in order to boost global economy. I read the news every day now - which would have been unthinkable to me back then - and the headlines continue to carry its echoes: the repatriation of British soldiers from Afghanistan; legalized sexual assault in the name of "airport security"; the economy lurching from crisis to crisis; any excuse for a terror warning. September 11th 2001 was one awful day in American history, but its legacy is one of global horrors - then, now, and in years to come.

Here's a thought: when you are faced with something frightening, you can choose either to live in terror of it and be governed by that terror thereafter, or to smack it in the face, send it running out of town, and live happily ever after. The people in power on this planet would have you believe otherwise. They want you to live in constant terror of anything - any little thing - that could possibly pose a threat to you, however improbable. Myself, I don't fear the invisible things the government tells me to fear. I am scared of heights, I am truly afraid that I will never sing again, and sometimes I have nightmares in which I never see Stat or my cats again. But I don't fear being blown up on a plane, or secret cults rising up to wage war on the streets, or even total economic collapse. In terms of the world outside my front door, I have only one fear, and this fear is the key difference between the outlook I had ten years ago and the one I have today. Back then, the future was bright and full of promise. Today, I fear it.