THREAD:
I’ve been reflecting on some of the people I’ve interviewed during my career so far, and wanted to share a couple of anecdotes about the uniquely scary experience of being not just a female journalist, but a freelance one.

Sometimes to get a story, you have to spend hours alone with a complete stranger, with only your gut to tell you if you're safe or not. I continually ask myself after scary experiences "was that really worth it?" and I'm never quite sure.

Once, I spent 14 hours in a truck with a man who was in his 70s, in a rural area of the US, in the mountains. He had a chainsaw and a gun in the back of his truck, and joked about ‘chopping me up’. I still got in the car - dumb right?

But I figured, if he was really going to chop me up, he probably wouldn’t have joked about it. I had no signal all day, and was in an area I had never been to before. Nobody knew where I was. In spite of all that, I started to relax.

I saw him as a kind of ‘grandfatherly’ type, and we got along. I felt safe with him because he was elderly, and friendly. But when it got dark, I noticed he was lingering, and making excuses to delay getting back, and he had been telling me all day how lonely he was.

By this point my stomach was spasming with nerves/anxiety and I felt incredibly distracted and jumpy, barely able to string a sentence together, and on high alert about where we were going. I kept trying to subtly cajole him to take me back to my car.

Finally, I got back, weirded out and shaken by the experience, but I shrugged it off.
A couple of days later, he called me, telling me he was angry at me because I hadn’t taken him out for dinner when I said I would (I never said I would).

He also told me if I ever came back and brought a man with me he would be “extremely jealous”. I put off listening back/transcribing the interview for weeks, because I felt so uncomfortable with the whole experience. I still don’t really know how I feel about it.

Another time I had to go to a guy’s house to film. I’d met him once, very briefly. I was alone, again in an area with no signal. He lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. We had to meet so he could take me to his place, but the road had been swept out from floods.

We had to get into his truck as my car wouldn’t make it over the road. I got to his cabin and felt incredibly nervous the whole time. At one point (we were filming outside), he wanted to show me something inside: his antique collection of Viking weapons.

We’re talking about axes, swords, the lot. I literally thought “this is how I’m going to die.” I was looking for ways I could escape / where I would run if I had to.

Obviously I did not die. But next time you read/watch one of those stories with fascinating, wacky, weird characters + it's been written/made by a woman...think about what she may have gone through to get it