There was Pearl Harbor.

Then JFK.

Then at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, our world was changed again.

American Airlines Flight 11, traveling about 466 mph, crashes into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Our world, our nation, our notion of what it means to be safe here in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and Dexter and Milan are gone.

The bruises linger.

It’s been a decade: We‘ve landed and lost jobs. Moved. Had babies. Seen loved ones die. Yet, Sept. 11 is still with us. Sometimes washed under a wave. Sometimes staring us in the eye.

But it’s changed us, said Robert Pasick, an Ann Arbor psychologist who traveled to New York City two days after the attacks to work with survivors. It changed New Yorkers, of course. But it changed those of us in the heartland -- in Ann Arbor -- too.

“There’s been a collective depression in our society,” Pasick said. “Our levels of happiness have decreased. There was 9/11 and the wars that followed and the economic disaster. They’ve all linked together. We have become pessimistic. We feel our place in the world has slipped. Sept. 11 changed our mindset of what could or couldn’t happen.”

There are the obvious, real, tangible changes.

Among our losses:

Darya Lin, manager of a Chicago consulting firm and a 1987 Huron High School graduate and graduate of the University of Michigan, was on the 92nd floor of the South Tower of the Trade Center teaching a class for her company, Aon Corp. She made it to the 78th floor lobby after the first plane hit the North Tower, but gave her spot in line for the elevator to a pregnant woman. She’d take the next one. But then the South Tower was hit.

There was Joshua Rosenthal, a 1979 U-M graduate whose office was on the 94th floor of the South Tower. His mother, Marilynn, was teaching health policy at the U-M Medical School at the time. By the one-year anniversary of the attacks, the university had established the Joshua Rosenthal Lecture at the Ford School of Public Policy.

There was Robert R. Ploger III, who was on American Flight 77, on the first leg of a flight to Hawaii, where was going to celebrate his long-awaited honeymoon. The plane crashed into the Pentagon. His father, Robert Ploger, a two-star general who had been on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, was 86 at the time and living in Ann Arbor.

And there was Alicia Titus, the 28-year-old flight attendant aboard United Airlines Flight 175 whose parents, John and Bev, lived in Dexter Township. Alicia, the oldest of four children, was one of seven flight attendants on the transcontinental flight that took off from Boston, was hijacked and crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Her father went on to write the book “Losing Alicia: A Father’s Journey After 9/11,” published at the end of last month. It took him the decade to work through the grief enough to finish the book. (See related story).

There were 18 U-M alumni who died that day. Their names are inscribed on a plaque in a quiet area of the U-M Alumni Center, and their names will be scrolled across the scoreboard at Saturday night's football game. Their children have been promised undergraduate scholarships. Separate scholarships have been established to honor six of the U-M graduates who were victims of the attacks. Over the decade, students have won the scholarships, attended school, graduated and moved on.

Lives changed in other ways, large and small: Sarah Franz, a native of South Africa who was living in Ann Arbor at the time of the attacks, felt compelled to become a U.S. citizen after the terrorist attacks. Then she enlisted in the Michigan Army National Guard.

For three months after the attacks, Pasick worked with a group of employees at Reuters news agency’s New York office. While the company’s offices were in Times Square, a number of employees were attending a conference inside the World Trade Center that day and died. A number of employees lost families members. Many saw the buildings collapse. And there was the guilt.

“There were narrow escapes,” Pasick said. “People who had tickets to the conference but didn’t go.”

At the same time, there was the need to get the news agency up and running.

Pasick had struggles of his own in the hours after the attacks. His son worked in New York City, for Reuters, and he didn’t hear from him until late that afternoon. Phone lines were down and cell phones didn’t work. “There were six or seven hours of not knowing,” he said. “That was terrifying.”

The struggles continue, Pasick said, especially for those who were in New York.

“A lot of people have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), even today. I ran into a man at a wedding recently. He said he can’t listen to the sound of a plane going overhead. He heard that sound on Sept. 11. And then saw the buildings go down.”