I'm afraid of elevators, because they are an enclosed space, but I get in.

I'm not afraid of IED's, bullets, mortars.

I've realized that the world is, in essence, full of banana peels - loaded with things that may unwittingly trip an internal wire in my mind, opening a floodgate of fears without warning.

I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.

Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother's roast turkey.

I think it's the human spirit inside of all of us that has an enormous capacity to survive.

Getting on a plane is hard for me, but I do it, because travel is vital to me.