460 Days in the Darkness of Somalia | Amanda Lindhout | Ep. 468

It's so deeply when I get up and double check his work. Trust, right? Once it's gone. But here's the thing. I've trusted him in the past. Oh no. I didn't go my way. And so what's trust has gone. Michael. It what? It never goes. Oh, what do you want the road for? I mean, I know you guys are making your way from BC, where are you? We're just relocating within the province. So we're moving to Vancouver Island, a place called North Sandwich, which is really close to Victoria. My wife has a friend, female, what's the proper way to say this? Sorry. No. I want to say previous M.A. fire. Sorry, Sarah, if I'm incorrectly describing. She is a police officer. I think she might be on Vancouver Island, actually. And if that is the case, I will link you guys up. Yeah, please. She's a badass. Cool. She tries to rip my face off when we train Jiu-Jitsu, and it's like, did nothing to her at all. I don't deserve any of the aggression she comes at me with. But she is gnarly, and I'm pretty sure that's where she lives and works. Okay. Well, is that so? Yes, please. Connections would be great. I get confused sometimes because there's a Vancouver, Washington as well. Oh, is there? Yes. And then it's not that far from Vancouver, BC, so yeah, people could really probably benefit. Why the move, though? Well, Nelson is a beautiful place, as you know, but it's in the middle of freaking nowhere. So it is part of what makes it really special and nice, but I've been there for five years. And I'm just on the road a lot. I do a lot of public speaking, and it's a slog to get in and out. So we have to drive four hours to the Colona Airport, which isn't a major airport, so then there's usually a connection flight. And you know, in some months, like May was it for us, because I think I had like six different flights that month. That was six separate trips to Colona, eight hours round trip, each. And I just went, no, we can't do this anymore. Would it almost be closer to go to Spokane? You obviously have to cross through the border. Yeah. Yeah. And we've used Spokane too. We've sort of utilized all that's available in the area. Yeah, why not? Nelson is just to remote. So we were like, where can we move that's beautiful in pristine nature, near a good airport? And it wasn't really clear to us for a while. We were just kind of like sitting, thinking about it. And I have one of my best girlfriends lives on Vancouver Island. And I was kind of reminiscing about some nice memories there and thought, oh my God, Vancouver Island, that could be the place. And so, yeah, that's, it felt good, it felt right. I mean, life's kind of an adventure anyway. What's the worst case? It's not right. And then you find another place that might be right? Yeah, exactly. I think flexibility is really underrated. People are, people really like structure and routine and that works for some people. I've always been a super flexible and adaptable person and so the idea of moving is exciting to me. Yeah. Yeah, I've moved a lot in my life. You have lived a lot of life in your life so far. Your story is pretty, I don't know the correct word. It's wild and fascinating, but for largely the wrong reasons, not that you were making pet choices, but you found yourself in some situations that were pretty utterly horrendous or a situation that was for sure. How did you find Nelson? 'Cause it is in the middle of nowhere, so you almost have to be looking for something that's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Nelson came many, many years after those reckless decisions that led me to the heart of Somalia. You know, I wouldn't disagree with somebody that said that they were some poor decisions, but you know, I was in my early 20s and I was, I don't know, testing my own boundaries and I had traveled around the world a lot and crossing a lot of borders and yeah, I think my, my ability to be with danger just increased over time. I had spent time in Afghanistan and Iraq and-- I was traveling the world and there's time in Afghanistan and Iraq and then Somalia. Those are two very different things. Yeah. Do you truly view it as reckless now? Oh, God, yeah, yes, I mean, I'm 45 years old now and looking back on this younger version of myself, I mean, I've accepted it. I'm not like super hard on myself for making those decisions, even though they had pretty significant consequences, not just for myself, but for all the people that I love the most in the world too, but I've been able to really trace the roots of those risk-taking behaviors. Like, I realized now things I didn't even five years ago, like, I grew up in a home where there was a lot of violence, there was a lot of conflict, it wasn't a very safe place. So being in a war zone as a young adult, it wasn't as unfamiliar to me and experience as it would be, maybe for someone else, I didn't value my life a great deal during those years. Yeah, because I-- Did you realize that when you were that young or is this looking bad? No, this is looking bad. Okay. So this is the perspective that I have now at 45 years old. I certainly did not have that then. Yeah. No, I spent many years after that big experience, like pondering the "why me" question. I couldn't really work it out. Like, why had I gone there? I mean, I was working as a journalist. That was my ambition. That's what I wanted to do, but was, I think I was 27 at the time. What was a 27-year-old young woman from a very small city in Central Alberta, Canada, doing in the most dangerous country in the world, right? I really had to be with that for many years, then have the willingness to ask myself some pretty big questions and go deep, go back to my childhood, go back to, like, who was young Amanda? What was I thinking? Why was I making these decisions? And I was able to come out with some pretty clear answers to those things, which now I'm no longer sitting with the "why me." I can trice it all back, and I just have full acceptance now of both the choices, the experience, the aftermath, all of it. I mean, it's all happened. So, and my life today is wonderful. How do you think 25-year-old Amanda would have answered the question, do you value your life? What do you think your answer would have been in that moment? I would have said, "I do." Really? Yeah, I would have said, "I do." How would you have justified the risk in your answer with that? I do, however, headed to Somalia. I do, however, reporting from Baghdad. Right. Yeah. I think, and it's not a lie, there was what I was very attached to at that age. And I can still feel into the truth of it was that I believed so much in the work of a journalist to share important stories from corners and parts of the world that we often don't see. And so I think of 25-year-old Amanda was asked that. That would just be the answer. But I didn't, as most 25-year-olds don't, have the self-awareness that I have now to be able to look a little bit deeper to pull back the layers of that. I'm going to the heart of places that most people, you couldn't pay them millions of dollars to go into. But I'm looking at a map of the world going where else? Like I've been to Afghanistan, I've been to Iraq, I've been to Northern Uganda, I've been to parts of Africa that are pretty scary and what's next. Okay, the worst country in the world, you know, which, you know, that year, that was, Somalia was, you know, pretty widely reported to be the most dangerous place in the world. But I just, I didn't have that self-awareness yet. I felt like what I was doing was, I don't know, like noble work in a way. I don't necessarily feel that peace now, you know, there's, there's a lot more to it than that. But at the time, that's what I would have said. I think I was peak-dunding Krueger at 25. I think I was at the apex of knowing everything while simultaneously. No. Right. But my confidence, I'm trying to remember what my buddy Evan says, just like supremely confident, never correct, or something like that. There's some version of that, yeah, which is just absolutely nails. At least young men from the age of, let's be honest here, 14 to maybe 45. Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. You know who they are. They're in Montana. They're a knife company, founded by Josh Smith, lifetime servicing on your blade, sharpening, send it in if anything goes wrong. They're going to tune you right up, get it right back to you. 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They also have, you could go over to the shop knives and just hit all. And you're going to see everything that they have to offer. They do two knife drops a week. You can stay on the note by joining their SMS or their email notifications. My suggestion, as always, is to go in there and get something that is small, a sticker, something that you can execute a transaction, save your credit card information. So you'll be ready to go the next time around. Because when they do restock on the really hot models, they go quickly. And I'm talking a matter of minutes, and you don't want to lose out on that. Montana knife company dot com. Go check them out back to the show. Depending on how fast you can get out of that, it's pretty bad. And some people never do, right? Some people never really get out of that. That place where they can't see a bigger picture. They don't grow the self awareness. My god, I know many people, people that are in their 60s. People I'm related to without naming any names. I just haven't gone on that journey of growing their self awareness to become, to expand who they are. You know, they're still stuck in the same patterns and habits. And things that they did that didn't really work for them in their 20s. Only their decades older now. Right? Don't you think? Many people do that. Yeah, and I wonder, and I don't recommend my own life experiences to other people. I'll answer honestly. I can explain my why as to why I went down those things. And the things that came from them, both positive and negative, and I never try to tell people what to do if they ask me questions about what potential outcomes will be. I'll be super honest, but like even with my own kids like you guys need to make a pure mind, let's water the grass where you have interest as opposed to me telling you what it is you should do. I don't ask my kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? I say, what are you interested in? And we can go explore that very wildly different answers with all three of them too. And they've changed over time. But I often wonder that person who doesn't evolve. Did they live a simpler happier life? Not that I would want to have that life because I truly do value the vast majority of mistakes that I've made or the uncomfortable moments or the failures, such great teachers. Yeah, but also, if you just, I mean, I don't know, I mean, I didn't do that myself, but I wonder sometimes, did I make the wrong choice here or did they make the wrong choice? Or is there no wrong choice we just took different paths? Yeah, you know, similar but different. I often think about, you know, you come out of some difficult, kind of difficult experience and if you're wired, like we are and you go down that path of like lots of self-reflection and growing the awareness and answering all the questions, I mean, it's a lot of work. And then there's another danger of getting stuck on this never-ending hamster wheel of the personal development project, like the healing work, you know, and the culture supports that so much. You become a show now. Eventually, eventually. Yeah, it's so true. Like, you can just never get off of that too. There's another stone to turn over and another thing that's happened that you need to like, dissect right down to the. I have buddies who have morning routines that end when they go to bed. Right. Yeah, me too. Like, excellent cold plunge and sauna ratio. Your morning routine just took you nine hours and you're exhausted. What the fuck? But also live your life however you want to. Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I'm the one to judge. I mean, I basically wake up every day and it's a train wreck. So I'm not advocating that for anybody either. Like, let's just see what, you know, kicks in the teeth. Life hasn't read today. Yeah. And those other places, it's tough to say how close sometimes you've got to danger. But do you have any sense of obviously Somalia was head and shoulders above specifically ended up happening? But do you think you got relatively close to that type of danger in any of those other places? There was like, it's kind of shocking that it took as many years for something like really drastically bad to happen as it did. Because when I look back on, because it was quite a few years of being out in the world in these really tumultuous places. And I, I guess I was just really lucky that that nothing actually did ever cross over until like a full out disaster. But sure, there was lots of scary things. I mean, when I was in Afghanistan, I was in Afghanistan for almost a year. And I was as a journalist embedded with the American military and the Canadian military. We're going out and there's fire fights with the Taliban. And I'm just like down on the ground. There's bullets flying around. I mean, I lived that and nothing happened. And then in Iraq, there was an experience that I had with, I was out with like my cameraman and my fixer and drivers. There was like a group of us. And we were in an area where there was a lot going on. It was not safe to be there. And yeah, we got stopped by a militant group. And that could have, that could have become what happened in Somalia. I could have easily become abducted. For whatever reason, they let us go. But when I was in captivity in Somalia, I often thought back to that experience, which had only been like six months before I actually got taken in Mogadishu. And so yeah, there were numerous other frightening experiences. The Iraq group might have been hesitant because of the vast military presence from both the U.S. and Canada. And it brings a lot of scrutiny and heat. And with that comes a lot of pressure, especially if you can be applied. What was your, at that time, what was, do you remember what your biggest fear was? Was it death? Was it injury? Was it abduction? Well, it was, I know for sure what it was. It was being beheaded, which is pretty gruesome. Let's add the tail and look at that, too, and ending up on YouTube. Right. Yeah. But that was very much. I remember at that time, it was 2008 when I was in Iraq. And you just, you saw that kind of thing in the streets a lot. You would see, I guess, horrible to even put a voice to it. But yeah, you would see people who had died in that most terrible of ways, like their bodies on the street. Or the bread concrete or a street corner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, my god, that puts some fear in you. So definitely that was my biggest fear that I carried with me all through captivity as well, because that was what they often threatened me with that that's what they were going to do. And so, yeah, I lived with that fear for a long time. How did you decide on going to Somali? You were in Iraq at the time? Yeah, I was living in Iraq. Just a quick vacay over to the Horn of Africa, you know? As you do. Just just bounce over for the weekend. Yeah. A short flight. Yeah. Yeah, I was living in Baghdad. I lived in an apartment building that like all the all the major journalists were living in. It's quite a scene there, you know? And like like most of us were always also looking for other stories. What else is going on? And there was a lot going on in Somalia that year. There was a big food crisis that became a famine. And because it was so dangerous, I mean, everybody wanted to go. That's the thing. If you're wired to go to these places, I mean, I'm sure it'd be interesting. Now all the people that I knew back then, all those journalists who, I mean, they just went from war zone to war zone to war zone. Like what's the back story there? Why were we all there? Right? We were all wanting to go to Somalia. But, you know, for many of them, it's like news editors that are saying, no, right, we'll get a local fixer to get the story. I had more freedom because I was mostly free lands. And so I thought, well, here's a great opportunity for me because others aren't able to go. There's there's some pretty big genuine stories coming out of the Horn of Africa right now. So it was supposed to be a one week work trip. And I, I had some contacts in the country from other journalist friends who had been there over the years. So I was connected with like the main fixer, like the guy who organizes everything for any journalist that went there at that time. Like he was like, you know, at the top of the chain, a joce was his name. And so I felt pretty confident having someone like that organize the security detail and all the logistics. And so yeah, it was supposed to be this quick, this quick work trip. I left behind all my stuff and my apartment and just went with a backpack with an Australian guy who I'd known for many years. He at one time was a boyfriend of mine. But we were no longer a couple for many years. But he's a pretty great photographer. And he was not so far away as in London. And he said, yeah, I'll join you. So we met in Kenya. And then together we went on that faithful trip. Why do you think all of the reporters wanted to go? There's a difference between actively participating or being engaged in whores and like the soldiers that you were with in Afghanistan. There's a huge difference between being there and being able to shoot back and not even having a gun to shoot back with and relying upon other people. Why do they want to go? Well, I can't answer that for them. But I mean, like in general, is it a competition for the story? Is that how you build your bonafidis in that world? It's your resume. Are they drawn to it? Because again, it's you're a witness, hopefully, and hopefully not an active participant. There's just such a huge difference in those. I think all of the things you named are a factor, but I've come to believe that those of us that are drawn to careers that put you in such danger, there's got to be something else. There's got to be some kind of backstory that maybe some kind of trauma background that going to these environments is appealing to you. That was the work that I was saying that I did much, much later, kind of pulling apart. Why was I interested in going to those places? Perhaps if I just stayed in that line of work, you don't ever have the space to really ask those questions and to reflect on that. It becomes your lifestyle, you're also drinking, maybe not everyone, but definitely as part of that culture, you're experiencing a lot, you're incurring a lot of trauma even in these environments. Even if nothing is happening to you that's absolutely terrible, the things you're seeing every day are leaving a trauma imprint. So what do you do at night? You get together, you drink your faces off, and you just keep going for working through things. Right? Yeah. But there was a certain point for me when I looked back and I would bet that if those people have had the space and time and maybe aren't in that line of work anymore to kind of reflect back with honesty and self-awareness on the story of their lives, there's probably something else there. I would, that's my guess. In that world, what is, what's your metric for success? Is it how many articles that you have had published? Is it breaking a story like, you know what I mean? What's the pecking order and how are those things established in that world? Or isn't there, is there not one? Well, I'm sure that there is. Now I will say, I'm probably not the best person to say the pecking order because I never had, that I never achieved that pinnacle of success. I wasn't, I am. What did you think the pinnacle of success was? I, I thought the pinnacle of success was working for one of like, the big guns, like one of the big publications, you know, at that time it was like Newsweek magazine, right back then. You wanted to be working for like Newsweek or time or, I don't know, USA Today or the New York Times. You want to be working for one of these and breaking stories and getting the exclusives. And many of us were not at that level and we're just trying to, I guess get enough experience and street cred that the doors start opening for you and you slowly, like in any industry, as opportunities become available, you know, you're, who you know and you've kind of positioned yourself with your past experiences to maybe go through that door. Yeah. Wild. Those, we'll call them, we'll call those major publication houses. How often do they use freelancers or do they often have people that are on salary or is that the move you go from freelance and yes, I have a contract with one of these organizations. So I think it has changed so much. I think the publishing world has changed quite a bit. Right. Since I was doing it till now, back then it was a lot of staff. And yeah, the goal was to transition out. I mean, for some people, the goal, I can't speak for everyone, for me, the goal would have been to transition out of being freelance and have like a steady job. These days, though, what I understand is that it's, it's a lot more freelance work because then those major publications don't have the same level of risk of something goes wrong. They can use local journalists who are stringers for them, who can get the story, get the pictures or just foreigners who are working as freelance journalists and buy it off of them, but without bringing them under their umbrella where they are responsible if something goes wrong, which was the exact scenario that I was in in Somalia. I had pitched the story to many different media outlets. Of course, everyone was interested. It was a big story. I would have had no trouble selling what I got. And so I went there without the protection, though, of any particular news organization. So that if something went wrong, they would be the ones maybe negotiating for me, maybe potentially paying a ransom. I don't think a lot of media outlets actually pay ransoms, but they'll do a lot of facilitation and they have insurance and it kind of goes down like that. But I really and truly had no one looking out for me. And then as soon as I was kidnapped and it was reported like that night, I remember being in captivity that night and my kidnappers were listening to the BBC radio, which was the BBC Somali service. So it's all in Somali, but I can understand my name and my colleague's name being announced. And I know it's news now. And of course, all those editors and news directors that I had been in touch with and that I had worked with in Iraq were like, you know, she's not ours, which I wasn't really, you know, and then that became my government and my family's like situation to deal with. How did it get reported so quickly? Gosh, I can't remember how that all went down. Oh, yeah, yeah, it came out rather quickly because so my colleague and I were in Mogadishu. We had that that fixer, a Joe's who kind of manages all the journalists who come in. And there was two other journalists who were staying at the same hotel as us with National Geographic magazine. So that morning we had each the National Geographic guys and then ourselves gone out to get our respective stories. We never came back. So yeah, we were missing and in a country like Somalia where there is so many kidnappings, we hadn't been reported dead anywhere, we were, yeah, we were missing. We'd been abducted. No one knew who took us for a couple of days. And then what happened was one of the leaders of the kidnapping came to visit us and he had a phone and he wanted us to call our families. And we had to, we had to tell our families like, okay, this is what's happened. These guys are demanding a ransom. And that's how the details of it started to come out. When did you know you were in trouble like as the kidnapping was ongoing? I mean, really that first day, I mean, even in those first moments like we're driving along a highway road, there's myself, my colleague, we've got three arms security guys with us in the back, a driver, a translator, so there's a little group of us. We're driving along. I'm listening to my iPod and like day dreaming and then our vehicle slowing down and I look up and I see on the road up ahead, there's a parked car and from behind that parked car, there's like a dozen guys that are now running out. They're all holding AK-47s. Their faces are all wrapped up in scarves and I'm like, oh shit. And rather quickly, I went into shock like I'm quite numb. I'm not even just completely terrified, I'm quite numb. And I'm thinking, I do remember thinking, this is a robbery. I had actually in my travels in Sudan once been robbed. And it was kind of similar to this. That was my first thought. I would look back later and think, I fully it was as simple as being robbed by gunmen. And so our vehicle was surrounded, our doors were pulled out, our gunmen were left behind. And they basically, it happened so fast, they're in the vehicle, now one of them's at the wheel. They're just like packed in like sardines around us. And there's a gun held to my head. And they just drove us off the road like literally through the desert. We're just like off-roading to a house that they had set up for us. So this had been very planned. They had someone had, we figured like someone had tipped them off that we were going to be driving down the road that day, probably someone from the hotel that knew our movements. And basically by the time that we got to that house, I knew we were in trouble. And that worst fear that I mentioned to you earlier about the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, that was already in my mind, that there might be something pretty gruesome that might happen. Did they explain anything to you when you got there or are you just being man-handled, no pun intended? Yeah, no, actually those guys that took us off the side of the road, like spoke barely any English. And I would find out later, not even that much later, by the time we got to that house, a lot of them took their face scarves off. And I'm like, oh my god, they're barely older than being children. Like, true. the youngest of them was 14. So they were like really young, barely spoke any English, a couple of words. So they didn't really have the means to communicate much with us. However, over time, it's interesting how you find ways to communicate, even when you don't speak the same language. But initially, no, it took quite a few hours for one of the leaders to come. And he spoke English really well. It's almost like comical looking back on that scene, because my colleague and I are in this room. There's no electricity. It's really primitive. And this guy comes in and he's wearing these perfectly round little glasses and he's missing his top front tooth. And he speaks English perfectly. He's got a little notebook and a pen. And he sits down across from us and he introduces himself. He tells us his name is Adam. And he tells us, you know, you've been kidnapped. We're going to ask for a ransom. What do you think of that? I remember him asking us, what do you think of that? But this was straight money right from the beginning. It was, it wasn't anything political. No, it was a group of criminals after money. And then he asks us, like this shows, even though he spoke English, like how really ignorant of the world these guys are. His question wasn't even what country are you from? He's like asking us what village we're from. And he's getting ready to write down all the answers. It's like, wow, they really knew so little about the world outside of their borders. Yeah, it was shocking, actually. And yeah, that's when we learned that there was going to be a ransom demand. I think he was asking us to like, how much? What do you think we should ask for? What is the fair market value on you? Right. And I remember us telling him the truth, which was two things. Our governments don't pay ransoms. They don't. Unless you're a diplomat, then they might do that quietly. But they weren't going to pay one for us. We knew that. And neither of our families are very wealthy, but like my family in particular, I mean, I grew up on welfare, right? Like my mom was a cashier at our neighborhood grocery store. My dad, my parents aren't together, but like my dad lives on long-term disability payments. So this guy's talking about asking for millions of dollars, right? Because in his mind, not knowing much about the world, he's like, you're white. In your countries, everyone has millions of dollars. Like it'll be nothing for them to pay it, right? Little did he realize. And we're trying to tell him like, no, our families don't have this money. I think the initial ask was for three million dollars. It changed all the time. But I think the initial ask was for three million dollars, which was like asking for the moon from our families. How long until it really sunk in? Oh, that's a good question. There was maybe even a couple months. Like that might sound like a strange answer. But it is longer than I thought. When you just said maybe a couple, I was thinking hours. Now, let me clarify that. I mean, the hard reality that would set in, but then perhaps it's my wiring as an individual to that I'm I'm very optimistic. And so I would think, well, they're going to realize really soon that like our families don't have that much money. And maybe I felt and I would be trying to do all this math in my mind like, okay, maybe if my dad sold this house and then, you know, Nigel and I would have these conversations, that was my colleague Nigel, how much money do we think our families could get together? I mean, maybe they'll just take it. So we'll be out of here next week. I would set these these these dates really arbitrarily that I would imagine and really hope and almost start to believe that it was it was going to be over. Like it would be like, well, this can't there's no way this could still be going on by Christmas time, right? Like I would believe that to be true. Like this has got to be over soon. Like this is so difficult for everyone, including these guys in the house. And so I I mean, yeah, I want to say it was like a couple of months that I just it really the reality of this, this could take like years. Really started to land. And then there's like quite a depression that comes with that realization, like a feeling of real hopelessness. And yeah, and then, you know, I would over the course of time, like I kept finding ways to kind of pull myself back up out of this. Like there's got to be a way. There will be a way. But there were from time to time, these phone calls with my mom, who was the primary negotiator for both of us. There were always. Which by the way sounds insane. I mean, but just a direct phone call with your mom. Right. I mean, it is just the emotional insanity of that. Yeah. I would almost not want to talk to my mom. Maybe just somebody's voice, I don't recognize. Right. Hard enough as it is. I don't need to. Hey, mom, how's it going? Yeah. shitty on my end. How's your day? Yeah. The way that they, the way that the Canadian government and the Australian governments were managing this situation was they didn't want to be the representatives on the phone, though they were providing support to our families. They felt like it was better for and it ended up being my mom, who was the voice of of of of our families. They felt that that would be that might soften them a little. To keep for the reason that you just said like it's someone's mom, right? Maybe it wouldn't they wouldn't be as like takes such a hard line. My mom was always surrounded by Canadian negotiators like from the Canadian police who were coaching her. They were putting up like boards of say this. Ask this. Everything's being recorded. But as far as the kidnappers know, they're just talking to mom. She's by herself. She's saying the government won't help us. We don't have the money. But I would get these updates periodically from my kidnappers. I was rarely on the phone with my mom. And yeah, it just sounded really, really grim. Like there's this this was where I really started to go, oh my gosh, this is going to take years because my I like I knew my family doesn't have this money like my mom is a cashier at bakery for minimum wage. Where is this money going to come from? This might, you know, I may not make it. This may take years or I just may not make it out of fear because as time was passing after the first couple months, especially, that's when they started just very regularly threatening us that if the money wasn't paid like quickly, ish, that they were going to kill us, that they would be head us. So they started saying that to us really regularly. So I began living with this fear every day of like when is it going to be too much time that they deem, okay, just kill them. How did you spend your days? Well, there were different, you know, I was in captivity for for four hundred and sixty days. So that's almost a year and a half. That's a long time. Yeah. And there was different parts of the captivity. So the answer to that, like how did I spend my days changed a lot over time. Initially, I was for the first three months, I think it was. I was held in a room with my colleague Nigel. In hindsight, that was the best part of the whole captivity because I had someone to talk to. We could trade information and try to problem solve. And then one day, really without any explanation to us, they just came into this room that we shared and they picked up Nigel's things like we didn't, we had almost nothing, but we were sleeping on these little foam mats on the floor and they like picked up Nigel's mat and they told him they've got their guns like come with us and they bring Nigel to another room in the house and like no explanation and just like that, suddenly we were alone and we were never again held together. So I don't know the actual math I'm born in sixty days, but say it's around about a year and a half for only for three months was I with Nigel. And then the rest of that time I was by myself. And those first months of being by myself were, oh my god, so challenging. It was the first time in my life that I was ever just alone with myself, right? I didn't have anything to listen to or read or watch or anything. I'm just like alone with myself in a room. And that was painful at that time. My own thoughts, like I hadn't yet learned how to really manage my own thoughts. And so I was, yeah, I was like plummeting down into despair. And things did change. for me when Nigel was taken out of the room because now I'm alone, I'm a woman. There's no witnesses to anything that's going to happen. So my reality changed a lot. And that was so difficult. It was so difficult that I began to take pretty big risks to find ways to communicate with Nigel. He was held in a separate room, but it was down this hallway, and I had to walk past his room any time I was allowed to use the toilet. So there was no toilet nearby. But a couple times a day, they would let me go to the toilet. And as time was going on, they were getting a bit lazier. They would always come and walk me to the toilet. They would just tell me I could go. And so I would stop at Nigel's door. He could hear me coming, and we could exchange a few words. So for a few months, he had become aware that bad things were happening to me. He could hear things in the house. And we were both just feeling so desperate. I mean, they're starting to really cross lines with us. The threat of killing us has amped up. And we decided that we should try to escape, like we should try to find a way out of there. And that was like the next phase of our kidnapping was planning and executing an escape. And then there was the aftermath of the escape. So all of those parts of the kidnapping were very, very different from each other. How do you survive that abuse? How do you get through that? Yeah, it's a hard question to answer. Like in hindsight, I've thought about that so much over the years. You know, I was saying to you earlier in our conversation that like, why did I put myself in such dangerous circumstances? And I was saying I think like inherently I didn't really value my life very much. And then there was something like a shift that happened for me actually in captivity, where I was starting to think, oh my god, why did I take such a big risk? Look where it led me. Here I am now. And I actually started to realize like, I don't want to die. Like I do want to live and I felt that really, really strongly. And so I think my own desire to survive played a big role in how did I get through those really difficult experiences of abuse. I had really connected to my own will to live and to survive. Not that it made it any easier to experience that there's, you know, something that happens I think when you're being abused and many people talk about this experience. So just disconnecting from your body, I remember that happening to me almost every time that I was abused, just this total separation from, okay, whatever you're doing is happening to my body. But there's another part of me like my essential self, you could say, like who I really am that isn't my body actually, that could almost transcend in the moments that suffering. And so that helped me, it helped me get through it. I had to find many other ways in the aftermath to process like those things that had happened to me once I was finally ultimately back at home and left with just the memories of all of that. But I think in the moment, you know, our bodies ourselves have such an enormous capacity to get through really difficult things that we don't even know of until we're in that moment. Man, what was the Jason Bourne escape plan that you came up with? We're talking the highest level of espionage now. It's so amazing looking back on it. I mean, I cannot believe we were able to execute this. Like, when I tell the story, I think people probably think like, well, spoiler alert, you got caught. But just the fact we were even able to get out of this house. So we'd been moved around a couple of times over these, so the escape happened at about month five. So over those five months, we'd moved around a few times. We were so valuable to them. They didn't want to leave us anywhere for too long in case like the neighborhood became aware we were there and maybe another group would come and kidnap us from them. So we were in, this was the house though that they had separated Nigel and I. And so we were having our secret conversations. And we knew that at any moment, we may be moved to another house. So there was a real motivation. Like, if we're going to do it, we need to do it rather quickly because at least now we can communicate with each other. Like, in a new environment, who knows how far away from each other will be or even if they take us to separate homes. So we were held in this, in this house and both of our rooms were in the back end of this house and all these guys, there was always like a dozen of them. Same age group as those where kidnapers are getting a little older. Well, they were, they're all between the ages of maybe 14 and 19. Yeah, so they're young. They're all, they spend their days at the front of the house. They're just on their phones all day. Right. And as, like I said, as time has gone on, there, there are a lot more lazy now. They're not checking on us all the time. Like, where are we going to go? Right. We have windows in our rooms, but there's bars across the windows as the homes are built there to, you know, from from robbers or animals. Right. Definitely. Yeah, it wasn't put there for us. It was there before we ever got there. And also in the back of this house was a bathroom and this was, this was essentially our bathroom. And they, they went to almost comical lengths to avoid this bathroom because we were to them unclean people. So it was really like, oh, they would, they would, they would, they would really go to these like comical lengths to like stay away from this bathroom, which was like at the end of this hallway, unclean people because, you know, we don't have the same faith background that they do. And so that worked to our advantage because in this bathroom, there was a window high up on the wall. Bricks had been put in place in this window many years before we ever got there. But those bricks were like really poor quality. The cement that had was between them was like falling apart. And we had a pair of nail clippers that our kidnappers had given us. Like, like I said, we didn't have much. We had like a bar of soap. We had some nail clippers, like almost nothing, but we had these nail clippers. And so we thought, I wonder if we could use them to chip away at this crumbling cement and remove some of these bricks. It was a bit of a project. It took a couple weeks, but we were able to do it. It was like slow going, but literally that cement was just crumbling to dust. It didn't take much. And then the bricks were just like crumbling as we did it. I mean, had our kidnappers ever looked in there, they would have seen in one second what we were doing. But they never did, like that's the length they went to to never go near this bathroom. And so eventually, a couple of weeks later, we were able to make a, you know, it was a pretty small hole. We were not being fed much. We were we were pretty emaciated. What were they? What were they feeding them? Need to be very big. Again, it changed over the course of time. We were eating. There's like a fried bread that the, you know, is pretty common in Somalia. So just like a real simple bread, sometimes we would get cans of tuna. Sometimes we would get a mango. Later we would get none of those kind of things. But in this first stage, sometimes we would get those kind of things. But I mean, it really wasn't much. What would you estimate calorie wise? Oh god, I don't I wonder 500 a day probably. Maybe some days it was more than that. But yeah, maybe let's say 500 generally speaking in those early months, we were, I mean, we draped it late, dropped weight. Later in captivity, post the, they failed escape attempt. We're talking days and days and days with no food. I thought I would die of starvation at that point. So I mean, it no more cans of tuna at that point. But, but the whole that we escaped out of didn't need to be very big. We were pretty much skin and bones already. And the day that that hole was ready, like we were ready to go, we had our plan, which, which was divine. in these like me walking past his room. Okay, when the hole is ready and, you know, I would walk past his room several times a day as I'm using the toilet and as long as they weren't watching me, we could just exchange a few words, but enough to come up with a plan. And so our plan was that we would do it in the middle of the day, and we knew that there was a mosque really close by because we could hear that call to prayer, like so close, and we thought, okay, once we jump out of this hole, we'll find the mosque, and hopefully someone will be willing to help us. And that might sound kind of naive, but I will say, I mean, for both the Nigel and myself who've traveled the world like a ton, I do think it's true that most people will help you, like even in these kind of wild countries where there's war and all kinds of crazy things going on, most people are good, like most people are kind and will help you if they see someone in need. And I thought, I bet someone in the mosque will be willing to help us. And so we timed it for like the middle of the day prayer. We heard the call to prayer that was like, okay, let's, so it required a little bit of sneakiness, like get slip out of the bathroom, meet there, he hoisted me up. I'm the first one out this little hole. How do you get out of this room? He just, we both just kind of snuck out. We just moved quickly to-- Did you have a code word? We did not have a code word. Missed opportunity. Yeah, right. There should have been a code word. Pineapple. Right. Yeah, yeah. And also our kidnappers were distracted because they're praying right now, right? And again, like we're now so many months into this, like where are we going to go? I don't think they're even thinking about this that we're going to escape. And so yeah, we were able to do it quickly. I was the first one out long drop down on the other side. He follows. And so we're now out of the house. We're on the other side. And it's just, it's bad. Like it doesn't look like whatever we imagined in our minds. It might look like out there. It's not it. It's desert. It's hot as hell. And there's people not right there. But like we can see people who as soon as they see us, they are running away from us. Which, you can't really blame them, right? You see two white people in the middle of a war zone. Like we are getting hurt. I'm getting a cold in a window, yeah. Right. Get away. We don't want to be around. Whatever is going to come next, right? Fair. And we find that mosque very quickly. It was almost directly behind that house. And we see there's a big pile of sandals. So the mosque is full of people. And we run to it. And we're just about to the door. And I looked over my shoulder. And I see two of our kidnappers. And one of those two is like the worst one. The one who's been so terrible to me is one of those two. And they are running full tilt towards us with their guns. So we must have made some noise. They see we're missing. They look in the bathroom. Whole boom. And they find us. And we run into the mosque. And yeah, it's full of Somali village men. The women don't pray in the mosque with the men. So I don't know maybe like 200 men. They're all sitting on the floor. Everyone is absolutely shocked to see us. But then our kidnappers run in right behind us. And they've got their guns. They fire a few shots. I mean, it's just like chaos instantly. Everyone's up and on their feet. And we realize like, yeah, we're, it's over. We're not going to escape this. And so we're kind of just like huddled together Nigel and I at the front of the mosque. And more of our kidnappers are arriving like literally by the second. So I mean, very quickly, they were all there. There's like 12 guys with guns. And they're panicked because we're so valuable. They just, they don't want anyone else to get wind that there's foreigners there because then we could be stolen from them. So they're like really panicked. We need to get these guys out of here. And a really remarkable thing happened though that I should say because sometimes people hear the story and they think like someone in that mosque should have helped you, someone. And as I said about the people who saw us outside, like it's hard to blame them because they, I mean, there's been war there for gosh, almost 40 years. Like they know how dangerous it is to get involved in things, right? They might lose their life, which makes it all the more remarkable that there was someone who did actually really try to help us. So as we're at the front of the mosque and they're surrounding us, our kidnappers with their guns, this woman comes into the mosque. And this is the first woman that I had seen since the day I was kidnapped. So like five months, oh my gosh, just the sight of this woman was, it was like some kind of relief to me just to see another female. And she was coming in through like a back door of the mosque and she was dressed as most women in Somalia, or she's like fully covered up. So all I can really see of her is her eyes. And she just comes right over to like the kidnappers and she's yelling at them and she's telling them like the word that she was using is her arm, like what you're doing is wrong. And she just holds me in this like bear hug. And she's got like tears in her eyes and she's just like pleading with them to let us go. And they're getting really agitated because this woman is like interrupting what they need to do. They need to get us out of there. And so they just change their tactics quickly and then one of them grabbed me by my legs and my feet were pulled out from under me and now I'm being like dragged across the floor of the mosque. I can see out the back door that now their truck is out there that's going to take us away. And I'm being pulled across the floor. My pants are like literally being pulled off of me. It's just this like horrible, horrible scene. And this woman tries one last time she literally like throws her body on top of mine to try to like stop them from pulling me out. She's holding onto me and holding onto my arms and then she just like physically can't anymore. And so we're separated and I'm at the door now on my back. And they're about to like just pull me right out and the last thing I saw before I was pulled out of the mosque was I looked back and I saw her on the floor and her face, her face covering had come off like in that struggle. And she was, she was a woman who was like about my mom's age. And she, she still had her hand outstretched to, to me, even as a group of my kidnappers were surrounding her with their guns. And then they pulled me out and they put me in the truck and they brought Nigel out same way like drug him out. And we're sitting in that truck. And we hear like a gunshot inside the mosque. And I don't know what happened to her like I've tried to have tried to find out. It's quite hard to get information out of like really rural Somalia. But yeah, that was like the last moment before we drove off with our kidnappers to what would be the next phase of the kidnapping where everything that came before that would seem like it had been pretty good because things changed in such like a dark and horrible way. Following that failed escape attempt, like we'd really crossed a line with our kidnappers. And then everything that followed that was like the punishment for that, that decision that we had made. That is an exceptional amount of bravery from that woman. And I say that based off of a lot of experience, not necessarily in that area of the world, but in and around that particular at least religious culture in that setting. Factor some brave people out there. Yeah, I think about her so often. What would you have changed about your escape plan? Let's after action this real fast. What have we learned? The next time that you're kidnapped, perhaps the middle of the day, you're too easy to be seen. Right. Yeah. We had weighed out all the like options. Should we do it in the middle of the night? Should we? As if there's a, oh, clearly this is what we should have done. I mean, I lived with a lot of regret that we had tried afterwards, you know, like because things got so terrible. I was like, why did we do that? Like, why? There was, I mean, now in hindsight, like many years have passed and I can look back on that. And I know why we did. I mean, especially for me, the abuse that was just becoming part of my daily life was making me so desperate. I just wanted to believe that there was a way out. And so, yeah, we took that enormous risk and it did not pay off. Everything just got dialed at 10 after that. Yeah, yeah. I'm assuming, so the drove you somewhere else. Not back to the house, obviously. Yeah, it did not take us back. So it was clear they didn't know where to take us, right? So we're just like driving around in this vehicle with them for a while. And they're on their phones and they're totally panicked. They are furious that we've done this. Eventually, we get taken to a house where they're still trying to figure out like where we're going to go next. We get taken to a house where there's like a family there. This is like some family. One of them must have known. Maybe it was a relative. I don't know. But there's like kids and a woman. And like we're brought in and we're put into a bedroom. And we are just like terrified that they're going to torture us, that they're going to just kill us. What is going to happen now? They've been really violent with us in the car and being pistol whipped. And we were already in not great good shape. And it was so surreal. We're in this house, what's next? And we can hear kids in the house and a woman making a meal. It was so strange. And then one of them comes into the room. Actually, two of them come into the room. One of them is holding a brown paper bag. And he pulls out of this brown paper bag, some chains, some like thick, heavy metal chains. It's like, oh my god, what is this? And those became our leg shackles, which they put on there. In a kind of figure eight. So like wound really tight, like it was almost impossible to walk wound this piece of chain around each of our ankles in a kind of figure eight and then secured it with a heavy padlock. Like these things did not come off again until we were released. I don't know how to be honest. That's a really weird thing to come out of the paper bag, because they're heavy. Not the traditional carrying case for heavy leg shackles, right? I guess you have to solve the problems you're presented with in real time. How, so you would nudge a war back at least in the same room at that point? Separation again, shortly thereafter. Yeah. So a couple of hours later, they had figured it out like where, where we're going next. And so we are put back and now it's dark outside at night time. And we're put, and it's been many hours of terrible in this room. We're being interrogated like, did somebody help us? Did we have any conversations with people? And this is from the leaders, the, as we call them the boys, they would call themselves the soldiers, like, like the actual guys that were in the house with us all the time, they didn't really speak English, but the leadership did. Most of these guys we barely ever saw, they didn't live in the house with us, but they were there that day. That was like emergency situation. So there's like a handful of these older guys that are like the leaders. So they're there and they want all these details to us. Of course, no one had helped us and we, it was how it happened so quickly. But they're, I think, feeling very powerful in this moment and they're being very abusive to us. And eventually they figure out where we're going to go, we're put in the car. Nigel and I are sitting next to each other. And I remember us just like holding hands in, in that back seat. It's kind of trying to give each other strength because we really didn't know what, whatever was coming we knew wasn't good. And eventually it was, it was not nearby, it was like, you know, a long drive. Let's say hours of driving eventually we stop at it at what will be our new house. And they're fiddling around with locks and stuff. We're sitting in most of the houses in Somalia, like behind these big walls. There's kind of like a core, even the houses that are pretty basic. Like, I think it's a protection thing for the families that live inside. So we're out of the car and we're in this little courtyard and they're trying to open up this house. There's so many of these empty houses in Somalia because like millions of people have fled that country because of the war and just like left everything behind. And so this is one of these houses. And so they get in and Nigel and I are separated from each other again. I really wouldn't see Nigel much again. We moved houses a few more times. That would be the only like fleeting moments but they'd stop putting us even like sitting beside each other. So I remember just trying to steady myself like, okay, we go into this house. They put Nigel in a room that's kind of closer to the door and they just keep walking me deeper and deeper and deeper into the house. I'm like in the back, back, back part of the house. So definitely be no secret communications going on with Nigel now. And I'm in this back room and this room is pitch black as I came to realize the next morning. So there was a heavy metal shutter in this room like that was on the window. Well, that was closed. But that night they had gone the extra mile. They had taken black plastic garbage bags and like literally stuffed them in the cracks so that no light would come into this room at all. So I'm laying on the floor in these lake shackles in a pitch black room, just terrified of what like, okay, what's next, like what's going to happen now and everything changed. It wasn't just one thing like what's going to change as a result of that. It was like literally everything changed. We were barely being fed the water that previously they would usually try to bring us actually bottles of water, which might sound surprising, but the water is so contaminated there like we could just die from the water. So they were trying to keep us alive at least enough to get their money. Now forget it, like literally mosquito larvae in the water, they're just getting it from some dirty well outside. Now I'm not allowed to use the bathroom when I want to or need to. I'm allowed to use it five times a day, which would coincide with their like five times that they pray and I had three minutes and those like shackles never came off. They literally timed it with a stopwatch. So there's no more of them being lazy, you know, those we experienced in the first house, like a little bit of freedom that kind of came with that. No, now any movement has to be like okayed by them. In fact, I'm no longer allowed to move off of this mat at all. My thin foam mat had found its way there. So my prison wasn't even the size of this room, it was just like this little foam filthy foam mat on the floor in the corner in a pitch black room. "What was the worst day?" "Was there a bottom?" "Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah." There were so many bad days, but there is absolutely like the worst, the worst three days actually. And this came a little bit later after the one-year mark had passed. So the one-year mark was significant to them. They were really getting tired of waiting around for this money, right? Like come on. They would tell us like your families don't love you, like why are they paying this money? But they, I think the one-year mark they thought, we really got to like amp this up. We got to put some pressure on the families to pay this money. And Nigel and I's experiences were always different as a male and a female in captivity. For lots of reasons, the vulnerability of my body versus his for sure, but also just their culture and religion, there's an inherent, I guess, respect that they have for another man and an older male. So Nigel was like in his 40s at that time. And so he was mistreated too for sure, but it was a lot harder for them, I think, to step into like really being like really mean to him. It's just they're so conditioned to have this different kind of relationship with older males. However, I'm, so I'm like the brunt of everything, like all their frustrations, their anger. And those boys that are in the house with us, like their reality in a way too was that they were kind of captive. well, they rarely got to go home. So for a year, they've been unable to be with their own families and friends. And like, as time has gone on, even though our food supplies had had almost completely diminished. So had theirs, I think there was just less money for the leadership to keep putting into this operation, like feeding a dozen of these boys that are watching us all the time. So like, they weren't eating a lot and they were angry and frustrated. And so around the one year mark, it definitely came from the leadership and those boys were only too happy to like go along with this, that the leaders were like, we really got to put some pressure on their families. And the way that that happened was I'm in this dark room. And it's funny, like looking back, I had a sense. I had this like feeling like something bad was going to happen. And a bunch of them came into the room and they were holding a twisted up bed sheet that they had kind of made into a kind of makeshift rope in a way. And they had me move from my little mat into the center of the room, and lay on my stomach. And they tied my hands and my legs together behind my back. I guess like you do to like a like a farm animal or something. They had to really kind of try different ways. Maybe they had found something on the internet or something about like how to tie someone up the first couple of times they didn't really get it right. And then so there's many of them and they're trying to figure this out. And eventually they had it figured out. And my my hands and my legs were all bound together. They left me like that for three days. Part of that time they had stuffed a sock in my mouth. They came in pretty regularly to like tighten the ropes to abuse me. But I was never untied. I wasn't given any like water or food or untied to use the toilet or anything like that. Like I almost died. And the pain was extraordinary. I mean unlike anything I'm sure that'll ever experience in my life ever again. There's no words for it. I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I had a baby with naturally. And I can say that was like nothing compared to this pain. And three days. Like I I'm sure that I almost died. I was in a very gosh that's hard to find the words to describe it. But I was in a very altered state. Like where you go mentally when when your body when every part of you is suffering to that degree like just screaming with pain. I had at least once during those three days like a true out of body experience. A true out of body experience where I could see myself like I was like looking down on myself in this room. On this woman who's suffering who is me watching these young men just hurt this person who is me. But it was it was yeah it was such a surreal experience for me. So when you ask like what was the worst that is undoubtedly the worst thing that I experienced in captivity. How did they use that to pressure your families more? Right. So on the third day they came into the room. The leadership is there. And I'm I guess they had left me there for that long just to get me into this state of absolute desperation. And they came into the room with a phone. And my my mom is on the other end of the phone. And they're telling like they're like it's all a bit of a blur but they're like kicking me and they're telling me like tell her tell her there's a recording of this call like all the calls with my mom were recorded. And I have listened to it. It's it's it's so horrible. But I'm telling my mom really I'm screaming. I'm I'm in so much pain. I'm I'm telling her like mom everything has changed. You need to understand everything has changed like you need to pay this money. Which of course she doesn't have the money right. And I'm I'm just I'm I'm begging I'm just begging and begging. And the call is two minutes long. And the call ends with so heartbreaking. I'm I'm I'm saying over and over again. I'm saying mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy. And then the phone is like like thrown across the room or something and it like disconnects and that's the end of the call. I'm still tied up on this call. They're just like holding it. Holding the phone out and yeah there's a loud noise and it just disconnects and that's the end of this call. And uh later that night is when they untied me. They came in and they untied me and my my limbs are just dead right there's I can't move them anymore. And they tell me um we're going to come back in again and tie you up again. And we're going to keep doing that until your family pays the money. And they basically drag my body over to that mat in the corner. And it's the first time in captivity that I think okay I'm going to kill myself. Like fair enough I've tried to be strong I've tried to if they're going to keep doing that to me I just I can't bear it. And I had a small piece of a razor blade that I had hidden for like so many months. And I thought just you know just for just this situation if I ever needed it. And I thought it was like hidden under there was like this piece of linoleum right by the bed and I just like had this it was just a little piece under there. And I couldn't yet feel my hands or anything. But I thought okay like this is what I need to do. And through that night I like so I came up with my plan like I'm going to do this. And um but before I do I want to remember my life. I want to really try to through the ether connect with my mom and my family and just like remember the life that I've had. I didn't I couldn't have done it in that moment anyways because I couldn't use my hands. But that was part of the plan was I wanted to like honor my life in a way and by remembering it. And so through the night that's what I did and I could slowly start to like get this tingly feeling. It would actually be quite a while before I really had like full movement again or could walk. But enough that I could have done the thing. And I felt really calm about it actually. It was like it felt like a position of power like I'm going to do this. I'm imagining what they were going to think when they came in and found me and I'm so valuable to them and now I'm gone. But it wasn't just to punish them. It was like genuinely I can't do this anymore if this is my reality. And and I knew it was like time to take the action because I could see that like the the day was breaking. The room that I was in was pitch black. But that night they had left the door a jar just a little bit. But like just enough that like this little beam of light came into the room. It was still a totally dark room. But just there was this little beam. And because there was a little bit of light I knew like the morning is here. So I'm going to have before they come in and tie me up again. I need to do the thing. And so I had it. I had the little razor blade and feeling very calm. And then a little bit of my movement in the room caught my eye over by the door. And there was this little brown bird that had flown in through the house like the houses and Somalia are mostly open. They don't have glass on the windows. Somehow this little bird had flown in to the house. I mean, I don't think I'd seen a bird in a year. And was in that little beam of light, this little bird, this little brown bird. This is just hopping around. And I knew in one second, Andy, like I knew in that second that that bird was some kind of like a message to me of hope of like holding on. And truly in that moment, that desire to like end my life left, it was so amazing to see this little creature there. And it really immediately reconnected me to that like profound desire that I had connected to, to like live, that is what has carried me through captivity to that point. And I thought, okay, whatever comes, like I'm going to face it, I'm going to get through it. I'm going to, I'm, that bird represented the world to me. And came at just that right time. And I think it's amazing, there are so many examples of this through my time in captivity and in the aftermath of rebuilding my life where it's like things feel so hopeless. And like the environment itself gives you something to hold on to. And like this little bird was it for me in that moment. And, and it wasn't the last time they tied me up, by the way. But it, it really was the last time that I had that desire and plan to end my life. From that date, I still had five more months in captivity ahead of me. Did you name the bird? Haha. I didn't name the bird. Francois would be a good name. Yeah. Fuck. Five more months. Yeah. How did you eventually get out of there? Actually, before you answer that, yeah. Why did you decide to listen to the recording of that call? Well, Andy, the truth is I, I, I, I didn't intentionally the first time that I listened to it. That's not awesome. No, actually, it was such a shock. So, um, this kind of takes a conversation a little bit of a different direction, but we're bringing it back. Um, so my colleague Nigel and I experienced the captivity together and in our own ways, because after those first three months in the escape, we really had our own experiences. And people ask me all the time, like, what's your relationship like with Nigel today? And the truth is we really don't have much to do with each other. I'm very, very immediately after our release. He really wanted to like, do his own thing and, and that can be common when you go through a traumatic experience with somebody I had to accept that. Yeah. As you do when you go through this big, like headline event, um, people often ask you to speak about it and say, you know, you go to events, you stand on stages. And so it was maybe two years after our release. And um, I get tagged in something on, it was Twitter back then. And I guess Nigel had been at, so we really have nothing to do with each other at this point. But Nigel had given a presentation somewhere in Australia, which is his home country. And um, just a random person who was in the audience had like filmed a piece of it. And unbeknownst to me, Nigel was using that audio clip in his presentations. And so I got this tag and I really don't know what this video is and I click play. And then there's the recording. And you might think, well, how did Nigel have this recording? They were all, all those recordings were shared between the families of course, right? Of course, right? Between the government as well. Yeah. Exactly. So he had access to that. And so it was like, boom, that's, that's the truth of how I heard it for the first time. I do a good amount of public speaking. Yeah. I use good old Microsoft PowerPoint. I like to use pictures more than bullet points because it helps keep me on track. And I can tell a story through a picture. I'm not sure I've only been thinking about this now for about a minute. So maybe I'll hit you up in a few months when I find a better answer to this. But I am struggling to figure out how that would be. Don't know this man at all. Haven't seen the presentation. But just I'm really struggling with how that would be acceptable for an audience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have the same questions. And just for me personally, it, well, truly that's like one of the most vulnerable moments of my life. Like I almost died. And yeah, it was, it was quite a shock. Yeah. I'm going to have to noodle on that one and maybe rethink my presentation strategy. But I'm really drawing a blank in real time as to how that would, first off, what does that bring for the audience? Yeah. The story itself, just listening to you tell this, I can, I can see it and feel it and how you are describing it. Whatever. I wasn't there. Yeah. Doesn't make sense to me. That's a rough one that you accidentally encountered that. Yeah. Okay. How did you get out of that, please? Well, from my vantage point, you know, in chains and in these dark rooms, I had no idea what was going on across the world. And so when it happened, ultimately, I, it was a complete surprise, meaning there was no buildup to our release. The leaders weren't coming saying, we're close, we're almost there with the, you know, the negotiations. I mean, literally it went from, I mean, things continued to get really bad. In fact, the place that I was being held in when the release happened was, I was basically in like a shed, it was just had gotten increasingly grim. And then they come in and they have a change of clothes for me. So something's up, right? I've not received a change of clothes this whole time. And they no longer have the key to the padlock on my ankles that they put on whatever a year and a bit ago. So they have this little saw and they start their sweat and bullets. It's hard work. They're sawing off the chains, and I'm just terrified the law is going to slip. Yeah. I mean, it was just, but I still don't have the feeling that we're going to be released. And I'll tell you why because they had started some months before that to tell us that they were going to sell us to another group. Of course, this is the opportunity for just a total mind fuck. They're like, we're, you know, it's taking so long, we're going to sell you to another group. They can wait for the bigger ransom to come. Maybe it'll never come, but we'll just take some money from this other group. And so I'm, this is actually what I'm thinking is happening. We're just going to another group. So I'm terrified. And those chains come off, my ankles are just like black and blue and there's rust all over them and it's so weird to have movement without them and they have me follow them outside to their vehicle. Nigel comes out, he's a new close to and they pack into the vehicle, no one's saying anything to us. They've all got their guns and their, I mean, it was so dramatic anytime we'd go anywhere. They'd have like rounds of bullets like around their chest and like grenades strapped to them and like it was just terrifying. It's important to look the part, right? They definitely look to the part. Yeah. And so we drove four hours and I'm, I'm actually so stressed out that I've started to like vomit. I'm like throwing up in the, in the car. As time is passing, I'm just like a nervous rack, my nervous system is completely shot. And eventually we're out in the middle of the desert, we're not in a town, we're not a village, we're in the middle of nowhere and the car stops and there's calls being made. And out of the darkness, I merged these other Somali men I've never seen before. Also holding guns, they were kind of parked somewhere further away. I couldn't see their vehicles, but these guys are coming. And I'm like, okay, this is our new, the guys who are gonna own us now. So terrifying. And we are taken out of our vehicle, put into, walked over to, you know, one of their vehicles put in. No one's saying anything to us. I'm quite hysterical. And there's a guy from this new group who's really clearly the leader of everything. And he's on a phone and he's talking in Somali, I can't understand anything, but he's got a real like, air of authority. And he comes over to me and he just pans me his cell phone. And I'm put it to my ear and my mom's on the other end. And she says to me, "Amanda, you're free." And right away I think I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming, right? I think literally I'm pinching myself. 'Cause I used to have these dreams of this, of freedom of being released all the time, like almost nightly. So right away I'm like, this isn't really happening. She says, "Amanda, you're free, but you're not safe yet." She says, "Because we had to go with these new guys, now and travel to Mogadishu where the airport is." It's like the middle of the night. And so we travel with these guys. Yeah, it's not a short drive. Like we travel with them back and uneventful. And we get to a hotel in Mogadishu, not the same hotel that we had been staying at when we were ahead before we'd been abducted. And now it's feeling like it might be real. However, we get to the hotel and we're told by someone at the hotel that a few months before two French journalists had been kidnapped from the hotel. So now we don't feel in super safe. Excellent bedside manner. Right, but they bring us two cold Coca-Cola's in a glass bottle, like on a silver tray. It was, yeah, it was utterly surreal. And they had given us two rooms in this hotel, but I mean, we didn't sleep and we just wanted to be together in Agile and I. We were too scared to be by ourselves. And like the minutes felt like hours as we were waiting for the morning to be able to fly out, being worried that we were going to be abducted from the hotel or something bad was going to happen to us. But I remember seeing that for a sunrise from that hotel room. I still remember that and how that made me feel. I had missed that so much. I had missed when people say, like, what did you miss the most in captivity? Well, obviously my family and movement of my body. But I missed the sky in a way that is like, when you're really hungry. I was like hungry for the sky for that whole time. And I remember seeing that for a sunrise and just going like, wow, the world is so beautiful. And the kidnap and the, I'm losing my words here. The private security company that our families had hired to help facilitate our release were there. They hadn't been able to leave like the airport area, but now it's daytime. They can come to us. And there was a guy from South Africa who came into our room. It was such a relief to see him. I was still worried that maybe it was a dream, but slowly, I'm having moments of realizing it's not. And we're taken to like a little plane, a sesna. And began the flight back to Kenya, where our families were waiting for us. So this had been in the works for some time. So they had had time to arrive and they were waiting for us. How do you even nourish yourself back to health from that? From just a malnourished perspective? I mean, I would assume you have to start incredibly slow. Yeah. I was actually malnourished for a full year after my release because it took my body so long to recover from that experience of like extreme starvation. So it was its own kind of torture because one of my favorite things to daydream about in captivity had been like, what am I going to eat first? When I'm free, you know? And it was like, I mean, I think I wanted a hot fudge Sunday. I liked the idea of pepperoni pizza. Sometimes I'd go healthy and be like, you know, a really nice pizza, salmon and vegetables. It was the game I would play like, when I'm going to eat lots and I'm going to. And then I get out and I literally can barely eat anything because it just made me so sick. Like my body was just rejecting food. So that was pretty disappointing. So it took a long time to recover from that. I remember-- so they took us to a hospital. And we stayed in that hospital for about two weeks. There was a lot that needed to happen. Like my teeth were really messed up from the violence and-- I'm malnourished as well as not going to help you. Yeah, exactly. So I needed a lot of work there. I was super malnourished, just absolutely shell-shocked. And so we get-- we go to the hospital. And that's where I see my mom, actually, for the first time. So she wasn't-- when the plane landed, there's a whole bunch of government people there. And then we're taken to the hospital. Can you government or Australian-- the Canadian and Australian government officials, like the diplomats. There's huge teams of people there. I can barely make sense of who all these people are. I mean, I'm talking dozens of people. And we're brought to the hospital. Now, this is a big news story, right? So it had already broken that we were released. And there was press everywhere. And so we're trying to be kind of hidden from the press. So we're brought in a back door from the hospital and put into a private area of the hospital where the press can't access us. And I see my mom for the first time. And that's the moment. That's what I had been waiting for, holding out for. And the truth is, it was really bittersweet, because I could see in one second the toll that this had taken on her. She really looked like a different person in many ways. The stress, she'd lost a lot of weight too. But of course, it was wonderful to be in her arms again. And then I see myself in a mirror. Really like looking at myself, I remember in that hospital. Like there'd been a mirror at that hotel in Mogadish. But I was just in such a state of shock. Like now, OK, it's landing that I'm safe. I remember just looking at myself in that bathroom mirror and just feeling like I literally did not recognize the person that was staring back at me. It was like like different eyes, which was pretty-- it was a pretty freaky thing to experience. It's like, who am I now? I literally don't even look like the same person. Not just I've lost weight, but like my eyes themselves are different. And so the road to recovery, whatever the language is, the healing journey, all these words we put onto what that process is. I mean, it was so long. It was so many years. And it was so difficult. Like the captivity-- people often think the captivity part was the worst part of the story. And in some ways it was. But the aftermath was, God, I don't know, almost equal in measure in terms of difficulty of getting through the days. I was diagnosed right away with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And the Canadian government had flown in a clinical psychologist from Ottawa, Canada, who was with the military to do the debriefing with me. So over, God, maybe a week or something, they wanted me to tell the story, right? And so I would sit with her and tell the story. And yeah, right away I got this diagnosis. You have CPTSD, which is like, what's that? Well, I soon got to know very well what living with that was, which was terrifying. Absolutely knocked my socks off. The reality of living with that volume of trauma in my body. And then I come back home to Canada, which was wonderful. And I felt so disconnected from everyone. I had changed on every level. And my friends, we were at that stage of life like they're getting married for the first time. their first child. Lots of weddings and stuff happening. And I'm this shell of a person, right? I feel so lonely. And I wanted to just be happy. It's like, my God, I survived. I'm home. This is what I wanted. But I could barely leave my house most days. I had absolutely nothing. I was very like very initially, sharing a bed with my mom in like a basement apartment suite where she had been living. Like I had no money. I had nothing. So the rebuilding of my life took so many years. And with great difficulty and effort was I able to do it. It seems like you. First of all, I can't even fathom what the journey after that would be. What is the. I'm familiar with post-traumatic stress, the term. What is the complexity? Does that mean it's just a level of severity? Yeah, to make it really simple, it means it's really bad. So it's a nice way of saying that. Yeah. The clinical way of saying like, "Oh, you're fucked up." Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like it was off the charts. And I know eventually it was quite a long journey to find this particular psychologist. But I eventually found my way to a woman who has done a lot of work with survivors of torture. She had said to me many times that like my PTSD was like pretty much the worst that she had ever seen. Well, I mean, torture, you can play with vernacular if you want to, but it sounds like you were living it for 460 days. Maybe two different degrees, obviously, and it sounds like it got worse after the. I'll call it the Shawshank Redemption Escape. Man. I was reading your bio before we started talking and it seems like you got back to work pretty quick. Maybe not work is the right answer. You got back in motion. Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Brunt. Brunt is giving one lucky winner $50,000 in the Brunt potty of gold sweepstakes. Seriously, that is a crap ton of cash. Yes, the name a little bit odd. The prize is very real. It's from now until September 18th. 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I'm glad you're bringing bringing up this return to Somalia, because that is so directly linked to my PTSD. So there's a really common symptom that people who have PTSD have, and it's called reenactment. And what that is is you unconsciously put yourself back in situations which resemble where the original trauma happened, because you're seeking some consciously seeking a different ending or some kind of resolution to it. And you can see this with very different stories than mine, but where the same kind of terrible thing can happen to a person many times with maybe different people. And three people in the outside will say, yeah, how right? Why? Yeah. Why would you? Why would you put yourself back in that situation? Absolutely. And believe me now sitting where I'm at with, you know, the vibrant health that I have today, my God, you you could not pay me all the money in the world to go back there. I'll just say that. Even if Somalia became a really peaceful, nice country, not going back there. No thanks. And they're done that, right? However, at that point in my recovery, yeah, I didn't understand that. So basically what happened was I was released, had this massive amount of trauma. And yes, very quickly, I was in motion, I was thinking about, okay, like, what am I going to do now? And it's, you know, it's a curious thing when you go through a trauma that isn't just private, but is playing out on the front pages of newspapers. And this is back when people saw red newspapers and it's on TV. And everybody's like, what are you going to do now? And there's, I think I really, in hindsight, now looking back, I think I really felt this. Like there was almost like an expectation of me or something from this public that this that I didn't even know to, yeah, to do something meaningful, right? With this experience. And when it was, when I was released, you know, what was what was really genuinely touching to me was the response from the Canadian Somali community. This community, like, showed up, like, they, they held, I remember, like, very soon after I came back to Canada, they held this in Calgary, the city where I was living at that time. That community held this beautiful event where they had different people, you know, speak about, well, basically apologizing on behalf of like the bigger community, like, what had happened to me. It just like really heartfelt. There was a, you know, kind of famous Somali artist who had done like this beautiful painting for me of a bird and not even knowing the story of the bird, but, you know, just what birds represent freedom. And it just, it really touched me. And it actually made genuine connections with a number of people in that community. And so when people were asking me, like, what are you going to do now? It's interesting how quickly two people are like, right away, like, have you forgiven them? What are, what are your thoughts on Somali people? And like, I'm really free. I'm like, three weeks. Oh my God, it's like immediate. I mean, there are things that you can be curious about. And then maybe just sit with yourself with those thoughts. Like, read the room. Yeah. And because I was, you know, a lot younger than I am now, pretty shell shocked, hadn't gone on the journey of self-awareness that I embarked on later. I, I think I really just stepped into lacking a sense of purpose, just stepped into this, like, what do people want me to be? Right? I'm the hostage who wants to forgive everybody and do something for that country that, you know, I'd experienced so much loss in. And that's exactly what I did. So with the support of the Canadian Somali community, we did a whole bunch of fundraising for educational programs, mostly for women in Somalia. And the story within myself at the time was like, this is a way to honor the woman at the mosque who had tried to help me. And, and of course, I was, that experience made me very aware of the conditions in that country, which, you know, it is very sad that there are these places in the world where these decades of war are like young people don't have any great opportunities. And so there was this big spotlight on me. And so I was doing all this fundraising. And that was very successful. Like, I, you know, the group of us collectively, like we raised about three million dollars to support these different programs in Somalia. And yes, that work brought me back into Somalia. And I, as I said, I now recognize very much the role that PTSD was playing in that. There was a lot of different factors, I mean, certainly no one will ever find the amount of present day sitting here defending that decision or saying that that was like a, you know, it was, yeah, it was very complex at the time. time. And I was just moving forward in the ways that I thought were best. I didn't have the kind of professional care that would come a little later to help me maybe understand why I was making some of those decisions. I actually found it really challenging initially to find any kind of help. Because what I had gone through was so extreme, right? It's like I was kidnapped for a year and a half in a foreign country and went through all these kinds of abuse and torture. And now I'm just in like some psychologist office in the small city of Calgary, who's never seen anything like this before. Like it was really, really hard to find good care. So I was making a lot of these decisions really uneducated about my own condition, like what I was living with and what that can manifest into. So I can't I just choose not to live in a place of regret. Like I wish I wouldn't have done that undoubtedly that would have created so much more stress for my poor family. I'm going back to Somalia. I went with kidnap and ransom insurance when I went back and things that I didn't have the first time. Nevertheless, my God, I would never do that now. But you know, I have to look back on that version of myself with some compassion to you and just I was very lost at that time. When you were doing that, focusing on being the Amanda that you thought people wanted you to be in the forgiveness or being the public face of the fundraising, there's a I get there's a performative aspect of that when you're the public face. How were you though? How is that serving you when you were alone by yourself? What I remember about that stage of my life was just being so profoundly lonely. I really felt like no one could understand me. Of course, I was the only one who ever went through that, but it's such a rare and unique experience. And even my the other captive Nigel, like we were we weren't even in touch with each other. So it that work, the sort of outward mission of my life at that time to help the people of Somalia. It wasn't fulfilling to me on a personal level. Yeah, the truth is, I felt totally lost, very alone and very damaged. I really did. I, you know, that was that was such a feeling that stayed with me for so many years that like I was irreparably damaged. Did you really want to forgive him? So I love the opportunity to talk about this because I really haven't gotten to talk about this very much. I think there's an important step before forgiveness. Now granted, I'm not going to say therapy, by the way, my answer is revenge. However, I'm not trying to maybe don't come to me for advice, but like I'm sorry, where are these people? What did they do to you? I, I try, I try to be and I've gotten much more empathetic as I've gotten older and I do my best to try to see the world through other people's eyes and I'll ask myself, what has this person maybe seen or experienced that I haven't and would it change how I felt? All of that shit falls to the wayside when it comes to kidnapping and abuse and all of that stuff. So maybe you're better to talk about forgiveness than me because like I said, that's a really important middle step there. I have a three step program. Well, I think the, first of all, I think there's there's such a cultural component of this. Like we really idealize this idea of forgiveness and it's just like a switch that you flip. And then if only if I have you for, it's like I said, I mean, it was, it was kind of shocking how that was one of the first questions and people still ask me that, right? It's, but even in the immediate aftermath of that people want to know, have you forgiven them? Are you going to forgive them? What do you think about the people there? It's like I haven't even had a chance to digest this. But if you're not willing to go deep with that, I think it's really easy to, and in some ways, convenient emotionally to skip over the volcano of anger that you actually have and just go, okay, yeah, sure, I forgiven. I don't really need to think about all the anger that I the rage and all of that that's inside of me. And if I land there on the forgiveness, everyone pats you on the back and goes, oh my God, that's amazing. And, and then it's even harder to step away from that. So noble and honor, right? And meanwhile, you're fucking exploding inside. Yeah. And maybe for some people, for me, for sure, I, because I was bypassing the anger. I wasn't even really in touch with it. It wasn't like at the end of the day, I was laying in bed going, oh, this is so inauthentic. I'm so pissed. I couldn't even really be in touch with that. It was like I had put up this wall against my real feelings. And I jumped right to what was the easiest to get to. It wasn't real, the forgiveness part at that time. But it kind of was a good block from what was really going on inside me, which I wouldn't really be able to touch on until many, many years later. So I could say, yeah, and you know what I would say to people back then. And it's not untrue is that I could, without experience helped me understand was the conditions that could create young men that behave like this, like that these young men grew up in around, you know, violence and death and war and, you know, their, their value for human life is very low, if at all. And there's just conditions that are really hard for people from, you know, are privileged part of the world to understand. That being said, of course, they made their own decisions and, you know, acted in ways that are, but now my perspective is totally unforgivable. But at the time, I would, I would rationalize the things that had happened to me within that context of, you know, I've often said this, it's like a quote, I don't know who, who originally said it, hurt people, hurt people. And I do think that that's true, absolutely. I do as well. However, does that mean I should forgive them? Does that mean no? Or does it mean that you should go hurt other people because you don't hurt? Is that your excuse to hurt others? Yeah, some hurt people hurt people. Yeah. Yeah. So my feelings on forgiveness and what does that even mean? Like, what does that even mean? You know, I spent, you know, years later, I would really contemplate that. Like, what? I'd be like in the dictionary actually looking up the definition of that word because it's like, what does that even mean to really forgive someone? Because I don't live with the anger anymore on a day-to-day basis of what those guys did. I've moved beyond it. However, I don't, I actually, I do not choose forgiveness for them anymore. I just don't. I don't think they deserve it. I don't want to say that I forgive them anymore. I went through that chapter. You can come to my survey tape. I have a three-step program, I'll pitch. And so that's that's not where I'm at anymore. But that being said, I don't live in this angry place. In fact, I just don't think about them much anymore. I've I've moved on with my life. And there was, you know, a rather interesting opportunity for me to really reflect on that, which was very out of the blue. God, it was like maybe seven years ago. I can't remember exactly how long ago it was, but I got a call from the Canadian police telling me they like had some news for me. This was a guy that I had been in contact with after my release, but like years and years had passed and then I get this call. And literally it was on my birthday, which was, which was strange. I get this call and he says to me, I've got some news for you are you sitting down and my heart like drops. And I'm like, oh my God, what? And he tells me that one of the leaders of the kidnapping, the the guy that I knew as Adam with the little round glasses had been arrested in Ottawa, Canada. What? And that there was going to be a trial and that I would have to testify at the trial. I have a few questions. Yeah. It opens with what was he doing in Ottawa? Right. It's such a good story. There's actually a whole date line episode about this that's like totally for people that are interested in this story. They've done a really good job of it. I'm just like a very small part of that story. But it basically details the undercover operation that lasted many, many years. So basically there was an undercover officer who, after my release, be friended Adam posing as over Facebook, initially. Right. Posing as a book agent. and a book agent. - Strong. - Yeah. And Adam, you know, the details I got to know about him through the process of this trial, like for sure, just like a narcissist. I mean, he felt he had such a great story to tell, right, being involved in this kidnapping. - Mm-hmm. - And so it took many years. In fact, this undercover officer would travel to Africa to meet with Adam. So Adam's like totally buying into this. This is my buddy now, and he's gonna get this great book deal for me. They'd even like drafted up like fake book covers. And I mean, it seems so legit. So it got to the point where Adam, what they needed him to do though, was to come to Canada and then basically like confess in Canada that he had done these. And then they could arrest him there. So the way that they-- - Of course, there's small prints somewhere to what they can do. - Right. - So that's what they did. After all these years, he flew from Somalia, probably connected somewhere else. There's probably people trailing him this whole way. I don't know that detail. But eventually he lands in Ottawa, where he's met by his friend, the book agent undercover officer, who apparently I heard this story, like he's met at the airport by this guy who gives him a copy of my book. And then they go to a nice hotel in Ottawa and the room is set up with like a camera. And so they're there and it's like, finally, you're gonna get your book deal and they start sharing stories and Adam basically in that room confesses. He gets it out of him for him to say what exactly what he did. And then the room is stormed, he's arrested, and then I got the call. And there's gonna be a trial, which ended up being a few years later. And I, I was the victim in this and because it was happening in Canada, Nigel was a witness, but I was the victim. And so, yeah, that was an unexpected plot twist. - Yeah, yeah. - Did you have to testify? - I did, I did. And initially, very initially, I wanted nothing to do with it. I just, the time that the call came to me, I felt like I was making pretty good strides in my health. Like, my life was getting better. And then I got this call and it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. - Yeah. - And all of that trauma from the past was just like right in front of me again. And I wanted nothing to do with it, but they needed me. And I found my way with it. And I was really able to attach to that idea that this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. You know, there's that kind of nice saying about that. And that really, I really leaned into that idea at that time of the trial preparation because it was really difficult. I would meet with the crown prosecutor to do like preparation for testifying. And yeah, just telling that story again in that context of knowing that was going to be in a courtroom with him in there, it was so challenging for me. It really activated my PTSD. And I would go and meet with a crown prosecutor and then I would get like really unwell with PTSD afterwards for a while. Like, it'd be really hard for me to engage with the world again. And then it'll kind of put myself back together again. And then a few months later, we'd have another one of these like preparation meetings. And then that day came, you know, in an auto court room where he, Adam was in the room and he's sitting in this little plexiglass box. And my god, he just looked like such a small little man. He actually is a small little man. And he had a translator there and there was something really empowering about him having to listen to everything that had happened to me because he was never in the house day to day. As I said, the leaders usually weren't there. But they were, well those boys were acting of their own impulses. They were also taking direction from their leadership. So he had to really listen to just the full gamut of everything that had happened to me. And there was something very empowering about that. I remember like as, and it was many, many hours, days even actually of me testifying. But I got to the point where I could look right at him. - Would you look back? - No, he couldn't look at me. But I could look in his direction. I wanted him to look at me. And I was furious that he pled not guilty. And he actually, he chose to like make a statement, like he was allowed to do that. And he actually came up with this like big story that he said that he was also kidnapped and he had been forced by those guys. And they had forced him to do all of these things. It was so fantastical like his version. - It's a good movie plot. - Right of what had happened. So yeah, I mean the judge wasn't buying that. So obviously he was found guilty. And he was sentenced to 16 years in a Canadian prison, which became nine. And actually last year, he was deported back to Somalia. And that's not what I was hoping that story did. So hoping that there was a shiv involved in that and really shitty jail cell in Canada. - You know, and I'm sure you stepped program. - Right, I'm sure that he was in, I think the prison that he was in was, I mean, this is the prisons in Canada. I think it was very comfortable and nice. And he had a cell to himself with the television. And I don't think it was that difficult for him. However, what I think would have been difficult was, I learned through that trial that he had, like a wife and five kids back in Somalia. So I mean, being a parent now myself, I mean, I'm sure that would have been difficult for him to be separated from his family for that long. So there was some punishment in that. - Depends on how old the kids were. (laughing) Just arguing to be made at certain ages that he actually was taking a little bit of a vacation. Now he got to go back to his family after probably getting three square meals a day. And like you said, a TV. - Yeah. - Gotta eat the justice system sometimes. 16, you'll do nine. Hey, you were pretty good. Let's get out of here in seven. Like, why can't it just mean 60? Like I get it, there's logistics involved in that. But. - Well, I do wanna say, 'cause this is so like real to me is that yes, I also have many complaints about the justice system, but it makes me feel a bit emotional. But like the individuals that were involved in my case, both when I was actually in Somalia as a captive, which I found out were like hundreds of people. You know, in the intelligence services and in the government, like for some people that was their full time job was, you know, the Amanda Linto kidnapping case. And then unbeknownst to me, this undercover operation actually to try to bring some kind of justice to that story. And yes, I wish that he was still in jail and yes. But I have to, I just have to acknowledge that because I've had the privilege of meeting a lot of these individuals and my God, I'm blown away. Thank God that there's people like them that are working on our behalf, like us citizens who get into trouble. And it's not just their job as I came to see from any of these people, like the human beings who genuinely came to whether they knew me or had ever met me, they cared about me. Yeah. No, it's a pretty incredible effort to be able to do that. What was the most effective thing for you to do on your journey from where you were to where you are today? Was there any one thing that stuck out as a most effective modality for treatment? Or I mean, sometimes one of the best things for treatment is time too. Yeah. Well, I've done it all in all these years. I really feel like I've tried all the different things. So for many years, I was super medicated. I was following a pretty traditional model of how do you deal with trauma? You get a therapist. And I was very lucky to find a woman who was incredible. And then you get a psychiatrist and you get some meds. And that's sort of the plan. Did that work for you to just numb you? Yeah, it totally numbed me. So basically, at the point that the meds came in, I was really suicidal. Like the PTSD, I didn't know how to manage it. I had the psychologist, and we were doing lots of talk therapy, which there's its benefits. But there's also this thing that happens where it keeps you in the story. And so I wasn't really getting better. I was being very validated, which is important. I felt very seen and understood in my crisis, my mental health crisis. but I wasn't getting it. better. In fact, I was getting worse. And so that's when it was like, well, let's try some medication. And so I was on a lot of different things. You're on anti-depressants, then you're on anti-psychotics, little bits of that, not because I had psychotic impulses, but because one of the classic symptoms of PTSD is ruminating. And so your mind is just going to the same thing. So you take a little sliver of this and that's going to curb the ruminations. And so very initially, at least those meds helped with the suicidal ideations. They did, like, very initially. But rather quickly, even the benefits of that went away. And I could see really no measurable gains in terms of my health and my mental health. And yet I was on those meds for many years, like eight years. And what we kept doing, which is kind of the thing that happens is you sit down with your psychiatrists and you assess, how are we doing? Okay. So then you increase the dosage. Maybe you add something else into the mix. And now you were taking three. Now you're taking five. Now you're taking eight. And and yet you're actually, I mean, I'll speak for myself, I'm not feeling any better on all of these meds. And I'm just feeling completely numbed from the experience of life. So it's not even working very well to curb the edges of my activation, like an activated nervous system. It's not even doing that very well. But what it is doing is it's curbing the edges of joy. And my ability to be present in my life, like many people say this that are highly medicated, you don't feel like yourself, you feel numb, you feel like a shell of a person. That was my experience. And so I lived like that for many years, thinking, well, this is the way it is because I have PTSD. And I have to be medicated until, and it's kind of like an amazing set of circumstances, how it happened. Like my brother, my older brother had gone and done ayahuasca. He had done this plant medicine that I had never heard of before. And he told me about his experiences. And it was a couple years later, I'm in this very medicated state. I'm once again very suicidal. I just don't even really want to be alive. Are you doing public facing things at this time too? Yeah, definitely. My book has now come out in this time. My book, which was and is like very successful, New York Times bestseller, International bestseller. I'm going to Denmark on book tours. I'm going to Brazil. I'm going all over the place. I'm telling my story again and again, which is reactivating the trauma. I'm drinking every night. I'm smoking weed. I'm just historically classic pairings with antifressure. Right? I'm just like trying to numb the F out. And I'm just, I feel so bleak. I feel so, so bleak. And I mean, all people are paying you to get up on stage and be the opposite. Right. Yeah. What a mask. Yeah. And then I'm living in, you know, a beautiful apartment in Toronto. And I'm so depressed. And I wake up one morning. I'm not a religious person at all, but I can only say it was like this voice of, I don't know, say my own intuition telling me that I need to try ayahuasca. It was, it was so interesting in hindsight because my brother had done it a few years ago. I didn't know anyone else that had ever had any experience with plant medicines. And it was like this clear message. I knew so little about it. I called my brother that morning. He gave me a little bit of information and he connected me to a woman who, you know, this is the work she does is she's in Canada. Yeah. How does Canada treat it? Because the old US? Nope. Same. Yeah. Really? You have to go outside of the Canada to do it? Yeah. Or people find ways to bring it in and are doing those, you know, they're called ceremony. So I'll just use the language of, you know, that culture. But yeah, so she, she would do these, these private ceremonies with people with this plant medicine that she's, however she's doing it, she's bringing it into Canada. And so I was put in touch with her. And I quickly learned that in order to, to use ayahuasca, it's highly recommended that you go off of SSRIs, like antidepressants. It can be dangerous, actually, to, to take ayahuasca lawyer on them. And because this message was so clear inside of me that I needed to try this plant medicine, I was willing to go off of these medicines, which when I informed my team, my psychologist and my psychiatrist, like, hi, I'm going to go cold turkey off of these meds. And I'm going to do something called ayahuasca. Yeah, that was not met with, you know, very well. They were not receptive to this idea, which it would affair, right? I mean, there's these days, a lot more information about how effective these plant medicines could be. But this was like over 10 years ago. And, you know, my psychologist was gravely concerned. What I knew was going to happen was, I was going to withdraw off of these meds. I'd been on for like eight years. And I was going to, you know, have some dark days ahead. I put in my calendar, I just, I marked a date about five months ahead. When I went off those meds, cold turkey. And I thought to myself, I just need to make it to this date. I researched it a bit. I was like, by five months, I should be feeling better. But I'm going to go like, hit the bottom here because without all those meds, my whole system is going to be disrupted. I was already feeling like crap, by the way. But it's true. I went off of those meds to prepare for my very first diowasca ceremony. And I just, yeah, things got black. Like I just, it was the physiology of my body, just reacting as well to like the taking out all of those meds that they had booked my body. It becomes so dependent on. I'm so quickly to that hit you. Oh, like, I mean, it was like the next day. And I, and I also could anticipate it a little bit because over all those years, I was on those meds, there was occasional times like, I'd go somewhere for the night. Oh, shoot, I forgot them. Even missing one day of those meds had massive consequences to my body and mind. And so I knew it was going to be really bad. And it was, it was, it was, you know, for people, I've talked to many people that are trying to get off of these things like lexapro or what have you. And it is, it feels impossible to them because you, you really do just plummet. But what helped me was having that date five, five months down the road. And just saying to myself, I just come hell or high water, have to hold out to that date. If I get to that date, and I think it's better to go back on them, I'll go on them. If I think it's better to end it all, then let me at least get to that date. But I'm not, I just made a choice that I wasn't going to do anything before that date. And what happened between going off them in that five month mark was, I had my ayahuasca ceremony. And I've had now many of those ceremonies, but from that very first one, I knew this was something that was going to be a very powerful catalyst for my healing. It gave me a completely different perspective on the PTSD. This actually is something that arrived to me, this, this perspective in one of my early ceremonies, which, which to this day feels really true for me, that my PTSD, as uncomfortable and difficult as it was, was also the health, like a health expression of my body trying to metabolize some pretty gnarly trauma. And I was not allowing it. I was putting medication into it, alcohol, weed, just, okay, anything to not feel it. Now that I'd taken that out and eventually found my way to know alcohol, no weed, all of that. I came to this, this idea and plant medicine that, that my PTSD wasn't something wrong with me. It was my body trying to find us way back to homeostasis, to its, like, optimal health. By this, like, I'd had these activations of my nervous system. And if I didn't try to suppress it, and I rather allowed it to happen, and I held it with this mindset that, this is discharging some of this accumulation of my trauma, that as uncomfortable as it is, it's actually something that's, like, working for me. So it was, like, a complete shift of how I viewed this condition that I had. It didn't make experiencing it necessarily easier, but I had a different mindset around how to experience those activations, which were coming up, really regularly. It was just part of my life, but I was instead of right away reaching for the [BLANK_AUDIO] or just trying to do everything to suppress it and numb it, I was finding ways to instead try to regulate my nervous system while it was happening. And to just hold the whole thing in my mind in a different way, it's a discharge. It's happening for me, that it's bringing me back to more health. And over many, many years of holding my condition with that perspective, I mean, things have changed for me. My whole quality of life has changed. I continued over many years to have plant medicine ceremonies, ayahuasca. And eventually, I just felt a natural conclusion with ayahuasca. It's a very intense experience. It's like you're getting on a rollercoaster and you don't really know how it's gonna be. Have you ever-- - Zero psychedelic experts. - Okay. - It scares the shit. - Yeah. And people should approach it with that kind of healthy fear because it is very, very intense. With ayahuasca, it's literally like buckle up. You don't know where that's gonna go. - No, no, no, no, no. Hard pass. - In my experience, it always gave me just what I needed, but it's not an easy experience. - Almost everybody. So the play medicine that most of the guys from my old line of work, for whatever reason, seems to be what they go with is the ibugane and then phythemiodium-t combination. - Right. - I don't know why that versus ayahuasca. They do not describe that as a fun ride. - Yeah, I don't know. - The phythemiod, they describe as undescribable, which really doesn't help me understand what their journey was about at all. But everybody who seems to go get shot through the lens of time on that one, pixelated space and time. But the ayahuasca, whoa, that sounds like the same thing. Buckle up and it almost, like, oh, you wanna fight this? Okay, okay. We'll fight you. - Yeah. - Until you're just so exhausted that you can't fight anymore. - Yeah. - But life changing for almost everybody. For almost everybody, there's no magic button out there because I do know people who did not get what they wanted from that experience, and some that may potentially have been worse off because of it. - Yeah. - But for the vast majority, life, altering, life changing. I think super important to work with those medicines with someone who's really experienced who can hold that. - Not a guy who cleans pores on Friday and becomes shaman, whatever his name is on Saturday. - And there's so much of that now out there, right? Because these plant medicines have become more accessible. You have to be so discerning who you're doing that with. But I found the natural end of my experience with ayahuasca. But there was another plant medicine called San Pedro. It's a cactus that grows in Peru. It's traditional name is Washuma. And it's called the heart opener. It's very, very gentle compared to ayahuasca. It's, I've done that many times. It's never been scary. It's much softer way into yourself, into the integration of your life experiences. And so yeah, I've had many, many beautiful ceremonies with a different plant medicine woman where we've worked with that, where I've had really great outcomes. And the same thing, after many years, I just came to a natural end of that too. I think I spent many years on, as I was describing at the beginning of our conversation, like that hamster wheel of healing. It's like, and you can keep going and going and going on it. I mean, I certainly, I see people out there that are like decades into their healing journey. - They become defined by it. - Yeah, which again, I'm not telling you, but had to live their life. - Me too. - And maybe they need to be on that to be able to be functional, but from the outside, and again, zero perspective. So I'm talking completely out of my ass. They're defined by it as opposed to getting something out of it. It is now who they are. - Yeah. And I'll say, there comes a point where the best thing you can do is just get on with living your life, you know? Like, it was necessary for me to do all that healing. Definitely. But it was as essential to my health to find the natural endpoint, not to say that I won't revisit different therapeutic things through my life, but where it being such a big purpose and focal point in my life, in order for me to now enjoy the life that I have, the health that I have cultivated in myself, I now need to look at the life that's right in front of me and just live it, you know? And that's truly what I'm doing. So I'm married now, I have a two year old daughter, and it's, it startles me sometimes. We're in the process of moving houses, and I'm kind of going through old boxes. And I found all these old journals from about six years ago, and I was still doing the plant medicines. And I realized like, at that time, that took up almost all my energy. All my thought was, I have this pattern and I do this, and I need to work on this and in this book, there's like all these lists of these things that I'm dissecting myself, and I'm sure it was useful. But that is no part of my life anymore. I do not spend my days anymore thinking about, how do I resolve my traumas? You know, what are my patterns? What are the, I'm just genuinely living my life now, which I think is the best possible outcome. I mean, if something presented itself and it needed my attention, I'll give it. You know, I know how to regulate my nervous system, but I just want to be present in my life. - Easier said than done actually. - Mm-hmm. - God, what a journey. - You know, Andy, I realized I left out a detail of my release, which was how it actually came to be that a ransom was paid, because remember, I said, my mom was working in MMOH. - The government didn't pay the ransom. I think it's so important to share this, 'cause I think in today's world, where when you turn on the news, it's just like so easy to believe that the world is such a bad place, like so easy to believe that. - Let's just say pick up the phone too. This isn't gonna have to be the news. You are interacting with the internet. - Right. - Where a helmet is built. - Yeah, yeah. - So this outcome is just like really good news, which is that the way that I came to be free was through the collective efforts of literally thousands of people that had never met me before, like complete strangers, who responded to my family's Nigel's family's efforts to raise money for a ransom. So people knew what they were giving to, right? Who knows where this money is gonna go? But people wanted me to be free. People wanted me to be reunited with my mom and my family. And there was something so profoundly healing about that for me and still is. When I found that out because the most difficult times in captivity for me, like I've told you about the most difficult physical experience I had, but on a day-to-day basis in Somalia, my God, it is so scary to be face-to-face with the worst that humans can be. Like you just lose any faith you ever had that humans are good, right? When you have that firsthand experience that humans can be just total monsters. And so I really, that was really scary to be confronted with that truth that humans can act like that. But then when I was released and I'm in the hospital, and my mom is telling me like how it all came together and how it happened. And I'm learning about that, like literally thousands of people. Like school kids were doing fundraising. People were donating like $2. People were donating, you know, there's like an NHL team owner who donated big money. You know, they came in all shapes and sizes, but it came through community and the goodness and the kindness and the generosity that is also so much part of our essential nature, which has, you know, in my healing has that truth, that knowledge has gone a long way in helping me come to terms with the opposite of that. - I think thankfully the true expression of evil is very statistically anomalous. It's out there. Most people never come face-to-face with it, and that's an amazing thing. I'm very happy that that's the case. There's a hell of a lot of good, too. - Yeah. And I think it's so important to remind ourselves of that because yeah, the world is just crazy right now. - It's, well, I think the world has always been crazy. - Yeah. - My father was born just before electricity was invented and I served in the Civil War somehow still with us. That's what at least I think when he picks up his phone And does this. things that he does with his phone or comes over for us to solve his problems and like were you born in this century, not the one we're currently in the previous one and not the one before that. But he has memories of conversations with his parents who thought that either a technology or a time in the world was going to end at all. And it doesn't. Let me figure it out. And I think every generation has that. If you participate, though, only what I have to do for myself, so I don't go down that negativity rabbit hole, is I have to constantly and actively ask myself, is what I am seeing in the artificial world? And I'll just say a screen of any size? Does that align with what I am seeing with my own eyes in real life? And it's not the case. I do see a lot of kindness. I see a lot of love. Do people do some gnarly stuff sometimes? Yes, they do. And you should be as prepared as possible for those things. But the statistics do net out that the vast majority of people don't touch evil like that. And that's a great thing. It's horrible for you, obviously, because you directly were associated with that. But it's not as bad as if people can be led to believe. But just remember, for people listening to this, you have to participate in that to fall for that. You can let go of the rope too when that tug of war. Yeah. Did you have to stop doing public facing stuff to really have to make strides forward? Yeah, I did. In 2020, so yeah, so I was released and then had the big success of the book, lots of book tours, lots of public events, lots of speaking. And then 2020 came and I was so exhausted. I hadn't ever, I mean, I had come a long way in my healing. But I had never slowed down enough to really ask myself some big questions. Like, do I want to keep telling this story? Like what's going on here in this repetition of the telling of the trauma? And then I got this natural break when COVID happened, right? Like all these events just got canceled. I had two years worth of speeches and wind in 72 hours. Yeah. Which, by the way, wasn't that fun? I was like, Oh, shit. There was a bit of that. Oh, shit that I felt too. But there was also this really deep sense of relief. Yeah. And I got to ask myself all the things that I just hadn't created enough space for, which included like, do I want to keep doing this? Does this serve any purpose for me of telling this story? And if I am going to share it, what do I want people to learn from it? Because it can't just be the telling of the story. I mean, the story is riveting. The story is dramatic and compelling and people will listen to it. But there has to be something meaningful within it in order for me to keep doing it. And so I took about four years completely. I deleted all of my Instagram posts. I just like shut, I didn't delete the account. I just like turned it off. Like hibernated or something like that. Yeah. And I did the same with Facebook. I deleted my LinkedIn account. And I just like, I just went offline for four years. I basically stopped making any money. During which time though, I pursued a bunch of other things that I was interested in. Some body-based trauma therapy study. Sematic experiencing and craniosacral therapy where I studied to be like and it became a practitioner of those modalities. And I thought maybe I'll go into helping people in this way. But from time to time, I would still get asked to do an event. And I had been sitting with these kind of deeper questions about like the meaning of it all. And if I'm going to share it, like what am I really want to share about? And I'd come to some kind of answers within myself about that. And so, you know, I got like a great invitation from the NHL, you know, the professional hockey league. And to go and speak. And I'm like, well, I can't say no to this. I'm Canadian. Like this is a big deal. But I think I might kick you out of your country if you said no. Right. So it gave me a chance to really like dial in my messaging. Like what am I comfortable sharing? And what do I really want to leave people with thinking about their own lives? Not just listening to my story, but like leave them with. And so that was like a really great opportunity for me to do that. And then in 2024, more of these requests came in. And I thought, okay, well, if I'm going to turn towards this part of my life again, being on a stage, I want to do it in a way that feels good. So it's very intentional about it. And so yeah, I've been really like back out in that industry, the public speaking world again for two years, with a little kid in tow, you know, I just tell you, Matt, my daughter. And she comes. Yeah, she is. And she comes everywhere with me. And I can say like this work, I'm so glad that I came back to it again. I could have easily put it down and just not going back to it and let a very different kind of life. But I do think when you go through something like I did, something that is, I mean, it's such an extraordinary story. There really are like some inherent, valuable lessons and takeaways that other people can derive from it. So I feel that now. I feel a deep sense of meaning and purpose in my work now as a public speaker. I say no to a lot of things like being present in my life with my family is the most important thing. But I'm having a lot of fun with it. What do you think you would have looked like without that force break? I just it wouldn't have been sustainable. I was just deeply tired at the cellular level. And honestly looking back, I wasn't even that good. I was just, you know, thank you to anyone who hired me during those years. But like I was I really went into this like automatic like here's the story. I was quite disconnected emotionally from it. I was able to do this. Just, here's the story, right? And that hits you after you're done. Like by yourself, it comes crashing down on you. But now I do a lot of intentional setup within myself before I get on stage. I actually really set the intention to feel very emotionally connected to what happened to me. I think it's really important for my own health that I don't lose that connection to the truth of what happened to me. Like, you know, in this conversation with you today, like I feel the feelings that are associated with those memories. And that is my health that's able to do that. And so if I get to another point in public speaking where I just feel totally numbed out again, that is a good sign to stop doing it or to take a break because I'm being very vulnerable in what I share with people. And as part of the power of it. It's an amazing when she starts saying no to money that it can reshape what you think when you will derive happiness from. Yeah. I say this is somebody who's made some galactically poor decisions with money. And then we all go through our phase in life. I think where it's the thing. I have to acquire a thing. And then once I get that thing, I will feel great. And then you have damn it. I needed that thing. And also that one over there. And it just don't get me wrong. Money solves problems. Yeah. But what I love is the ability to do what I want to with my time. That's the only metric of wealth that I want. Yeah. I feel that too. Yeah. The looking at a number in an account and lording over the number and worrying about the size, the up the tie, the up and the down, trust me, I spent some hours doing that. But it's not. I don't think happiness is there. It's not. I really say this to my husband all the time. As a reminder to myself, it's like I've already won the jackpot. I have a relationship that's awesome. I'm genuinely happy in this partnership and relationship. And we have a beautiful little child with us. Anything else beyond that is just extra. And so it's so good to just keep verbalizing that and reminding myself of that. It's like I've already got the most important thing in life. We have our health. We have each other. We have happiness in our home. Perfect. Your husband is the one who connected us. Random series of. He was obviously working in the fire service in Nelson, British Columbia where we go up and snowboard every year. I don't know how they reached out to me or the randomness that he happened to be in that room who connected us. How did you two meet? Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question. It's such a cool story. Well, I have a follow-up, don't worry. Okay, so yeah, my husband's been in the fire service for 16 years. So the year that we met, he was living in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Not a lot going on there. It burns a lot in the summer. So he was in a pretty small city, you know, working with their fire department. I was living very far away by driving hours in the city of Calgary. And that year, it was the year before actually I had stopped drinking alcohol. [BLANK_AUDIO] When I stopped drinking alcohol, it's like all these new parts of my brain were lighting up. And I realized I had all these interests that I had never really explored before and one of them was astronomy. And so there's this amazing national park in the southern part of Saskatchewan called Grasslands National Park. It's one of the darkest skies in the world. And in the summertime, they have a couple of astronomy nights, so they bring in some people from one of the universities and they'll do like a tour of the night sky with a laser pointer. Now, this national park in Canada, most people have never heard of it. The campground at the park is remarkably small because it's in the middle of nowhere. People don't go to Saskatchewan on holidays, right, which I've threw it. But I had learned about these dark sky nights and to align with this newfound passion I had about the stars. And I'm going to drive there from Calgary, which is a nine-hour drive. I had just gotten a dog, my dog Poppy, and so Poppy and I made this big road trip. And we check in at the campground, this little campground. And the woman says, "Do you realize when you booked this online that you booked the only spot in the campground that's like a family spot?" Which means two different vehicles can park on this one spot. Well, I hadn't realized that. Now the place is fully booked and they had given like this other spot to someone else. And I was really pissed. In fact, I was thinking, "God, I have PTSD. There's going to be some like, who knows who this person is. I'm not going to feel safe." And so I'm like, "I'm grumpy about this. I've come all this way for this dark sky night." And I go and I set up my tent. I'm just waiting for this like other person people to come that are going to disrupt my peace, and right. And so this car pulls up and it's Ryan, my now husband, with his dog, the two of them. And he had driven about as far from where he was living in Saskatchewan, you know, eight or nine hours down to this middle of nowhere park for this dark sky night. And we were at the exact same campsite. And I'm telling you, when Ryan got out of the car, I mean, truly it was like love at first sight. I mean, I just, I felt it. Hands in man. I might try to get it from you if you're not careful. I just felt it. I felt something that I'd never felt before. And we had a great, you know, night looking at the stars and then, you know, we went camping the next night too, we moved to a different part of the park and just talking and talking and talking. And there was such an ease and familiarity with each other, even though we had just met. I mean, and that's it since then we've, you know, we've been together. We had to navigate moving provinces and, you know, all the things you need to do to be together. But Ryan is, and then ultimately we had our daughter, Lyra. Lyra is a star constellation that's best seen in the Northern Hemisphere in the month of August, which is the month that we met and also the month that we conceived her. So we knew we wanted to name her something with, you know, a cosmic connection. My name is just short for Andrew. But as much going on there and I only got called Andrew by my mother when she was pissed. And Ryan is, you know, as a good spouse should be. He's my biggest fan. He just thinks I have so much to do shout to me. Yeah, to share. And so he saw you speak at like their fire leadership conference a couple of years ago. And actually, what's funny is I remember when he went to see you speak, I didn't know anything about you at the time, but he came home, told me about it. And then that night in bed, he was, he doesn't often talk in his sleep, but he was talking in his sleep that night. And he was like saying, you know, I have the power, I am the power. And I'm like, wow, that motivational inspirational speaker really got you. So we laughed about that. And then fast forward to, you know, a few months ago, he, he read your book and was like, this is the guy that I saw speak. And then he was listening to your podcast and you sent you that message on Instagram and here we are. Follow up question. Sure. Do you wait for the second date to tell that story that you just told for the last few hours? Or do you just go first date? I did not tell Ryan my story for three months. Now Ryan already had figured it out. Okay. I did this. Well, in the modern era, I think you're going to get Googled. Yeah. The dating world, which I've been, you know, God, I'm so happy that I met my wife and didn't have to experience the dating world. But I, from what I hear, Michael, your generation is up. If you meet somebody, do you Google them? I don't. I think it's a little weird to be honest. Okay. Michael is an anomaly, I believe, of his generation. I feel like maybe Instagram, like look at their profile. So there's a light stalking that occurs. Yeah. Yeah. That's just a light stalker. In internet stalking, not like in the bushes stalking people. So I had, Ryan was aware that there was some kind of like big back story. And I just asked him on like date, too, to not Google me. But you know what that means, right? Yeah. That means at the second you get the chance, just go ahead and Google it. You're in the bathroom on your phone. Yeah. Looking it up. Yeah. I mean, then he did. He did find out very quickly, like the story and who I was. But what it was really sweet was that he just gave me all the space. So he knew. But he waited until I felt ready to share all of that with him. To move. Yeah. And so yeah, that was really special actually that he gave me that space to just be with who I am now today without all the story, the back stories and going into that. I mean, it is very interesting for people to when they hear that that happened to me. They have lots of questions. But he didn't ask any of them. He gave me all that space. That's awesome. Yeah. He's a great guy. Well, I'm going to get you back to your family. How long do you think we've been talking? I'm going to say two hours. Three. Wow. What do you want to leave people with? Other than don't go to Somalia, is there anything you would like to add? Well, we're so much stronger than we realize. Isn't that the truth? And when you're in your darkest days and when you're really like in the depths of whatever the thing is, the trauma, the divorce, the financial collapse, it can just feel like there's no goodness up ahead, but there is. And I think just remembering that good days are coming, even if they're a bit down the road and finding ways to connect with the goodness that's around you, whatever that is. It's the sun rising, it's feeling the grass under your feet, just these like little reminders of our connection to all that is to anchor you, to prepare yourself for those better days that are coming. Like, it saddens me so much when I see the statistics around suicide. These days, like, it's an actual epidemic, like it's, I always wish so much, I feel my emotions right now that I could sit with those people who are right on the edge of that to talk to them because I've been there so many times, so many times where I wanted to give up where I had the plan. And I'm so glad that I never did because this life that I'm living right now, all the goodness and the health and the happiness with my daughter, with my husband sitting here with you, was just up ahead, right? I just needed to hold on to get to today, step by step by step, that all the small steps that took me here to today. And if five years ago, I had just given up, I wouldn't be here right now, experiencing literally the best days of my life. And so things can and do get better. A number of times I've wished that I'd be able to sit with somebody in those moments. From the community of people that I come from, it's almost always associated with isolation too, and it sucks. I would hope that they would listen. I would hope that they would believe, but I mean, obviously they get themselves to a place where they don't think that they can, so it's rough. Yeah, sometimes when you're in that isolated place, I can relate to that too. Like it often, that kind of darkness just takes you there, where it's very hard to feel into connection with others. When I look back on those times for myself, I even told you the bird story, the bird coming to me in captivity, friends of all. Sometimes that connection doesn't have to be another person. It can be your environment. It can be the world around you. It can be the lake, the grass, the fresh air, the mountains. We are so connected to all that is to the stars over our heads. And it's just. holding on for just today, or just this hour, or just this next 10 minutes or one minute. Again and again and again. And eventually, truly, we'll get out of it. You, I really believe that. I've been there so many times, only now to come out and live the best days of my life. - I agree. It's what I constantly try to just remind people that you'll find a way through unless you make a decision that is permanent and final. You know, your best days probably aren't gonna last forever, but you're worst on either. - Yeah. - So, well, on that note, let's get back your family. - Thank you. - See what they are up to. Honestly, I think your husband could do better with this mustache. (laughing) You know, firefighter, traditionally Canadian too. It should be, it needs to be, I think midshin at least. - Oh, you gotta tell him that, yeah. - Well, he's not gonna listen to me, but if you were like, hey, what I really find is sexy is a handlebar mustache. - Yeah. - Yeah. We've had that before. We've had a few different mustache looks, but you're right. - It is so traditional and I don't think it works well with their masks, but whatever. - I think that's the thing, right? They can't have anything down here. (laughing) - I'm sitting with beers. I'm like, listen, man, you're the one running into a burning building. Not me, so thank you for making the pit stop on the way, thank you. - Yeah, thank you so much. - Yeah, my pleasure.