In the first moments of her kidnapping, Jessica Buchanan’s brain seized up, her mind went blank – but her body knew. Her experience of terror was physical. She struggled to breathe. She somehow turned icy cold, while at the same time she felt roasted alive.
“I had this very basic rumination: ‘This is so bad, this is so bad,’ running through my head and I couldn’t move past it,” she says. “I’d been given some rudimentary training through my work, but there’s no course, no book, no movie that’s going to prepare you for something like this, because you never in a million years think it will happen to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Somalia, LA or London, we always think we’re the exception – that’s how human beings survive. And then suddenly it hits like a bat to the middle of your forehead that you’re not the exception, you’re in the middle of it and completely powerless. I don’t think I’d recognised that mentally yet – but my body recognised it.”
