Every Day Was Striking
Why would somebody with crippling self-doubt and high anxiety decide to report from war-torn Iraq? Bound and blindfolded, my classmates were locked in tiny, ramshackle rooms below the yip-yipping of their captors. We were inside a warehouse, somewhere in the Maryland suburbs, a chorus of car alarms and howling rioters embellishing the realism of this mock-kidnapping and detainment. The sounds interstitched with strobe lights for nearly 20 minutes. All I could do was watch. I recused myself from participating in this portion of a hostile environment training course for journalists and aid workers, in which I’d enrolled before taking reporting assignments in Iraq. Looking back months later, I wasn’t proud of abstaining from the activities at hand. But I could not shake the angst and anxiety that has been woven into me over many years, to say nothing of what it meant for me to take an assignment in a war zone thousands of miles away from my rituals of comfort. The class was a
