In January of 2019, I was trapped in a hotel room in the DusitD2 in Nairobi for seventeen long hours while Al-Shabaab terrorists attacked the property. I was completely alone, and certain I was going to die. However, thanks to the incomprehensibly brave men who fought to get us out, led by now-retired SAS operator Christian Craighead, hundreds of us were extracted to safety. After the attack, though, PTSD made me so miserable that I started to wish I had died after all. Aside from the terrorist attack itself, PTSD is the hardest thing I have ever dealt with in my life.

This book is the in-depth retelling of the attack, combined with my personal journal entries about PTSD afterward. It's a true story about trauma. About how dark and ugly it can be. Because the unfortunate truth is: the vast majority of us will experience a traumatic event in our lives. But when I was lying on the floor sobbing, unable to leave my apartment but also unable to sleep, wishing that I had died in that terrorist attack, I didn't know that. I thought that I was uniquely traumatized, and uniquely weak. I could think of so many stories of incredible, resilient, practically superhuman people who had overcome all manner of horrible things. Why couldn't I?

So many of us know those stories about extraordinary resilience. Or at least we think we do. But what we usually know is actually just a tiny fraction of the story, a beginning and an end: this person went through something terrible and now they are amazing. This book is the middle. It's the nightmares and the flashbacks and the million times I wanted to quit trying, at therapy, at relationships, at life. It's the dark, ugly truth that we usually try to keep locked away because it's so painful and embarrassing to drag it into the light. But I wanted to pay tribute to all the other people who are struggling, or who ever have struggled. And the only way to do that is to tell the whole truth, middle included, and offer that little bit of empathy, and the flicker of hope. The tunnel may be incredibly long, it may feel bleak and grueling and insurmountable, but at the end of it, there is light.

*Please note, because much of this book is personal journal entries, there is some crude language.*