Bullets don't have to pierce flesh to make scars

I never expected Garland, Texas to be the place where my career—and my sense of self—would fracture. I had covered tense protests, courtrooms buzzing with verdicts, and the aftermaths of natural disasters, but never war. I had witnessed anger, grief, and resilience, but never the raw terror that would find me on May 3, 2015. The event at the Curtis Culwell Center had just wrapped up, and the cartoonist had accepted his award when gunfire cracked through the air and changed everything.

The "Draw Muhammad" event was controversial before it even began, a deliberate provocation that pitted free speech against religious sanctity. It had originally been scheduled for February but was postponed after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. On January 7, 2015, two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, stormed the offices of the satirical magazine, killing 12 people and injuring 11 others. The suspected attackers, who claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, were later killed by French special forces after a two-day manhunt. These events cast a long shadow over the Garland gathering. I was there to report, not to pick a side, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the tension in the room.

Many of the people I approached for interviews were unwilling to go on camera—something I found ironic, given they were attending an event centered on free speech. Eventually, I found a couple willing to talk. We stepped into the vestibule to catch better light. Then the bullets came.

The first shots sounded like firecrackers, almost harmless in their abruptness. But the hush that fell over the confused crowd heading for the nearest exit confirmed reality. Ducking out of instinct, I realized I couldn't outrun a bullet. At my vantage point, I couldn’t see much beyond the scrambling bodies, but I heard it all: the frenzied commands of law enforcement, the crackling return fire, the guttural cries of concern eeking out of the scared patrons.

It was over in moments. Unbeknownst to us, the two gunmen lay dead outside and a security guard had been shot in the leg. I found myself marching in a trance from the shock along with everyone else, as SWAT teams whisked us away from the building's entrance to a large hallway like the kind you find backstage at a concert. My camera dangled uselessly around my neck. I should have been working—capturing the scene, documenting history as I had been trained to do. Instead, I was frozen, breath shallow, hands trembling. And yet, somehow, I managed to call into CNN and report live from the scene. It was, by all accounts, my greatest journalistic achievement at the time—breaking news in real time on national television. But behind the scenes, it marked the beginning of a personal unraveling. What should have been a career high point carried with it an invisible cost, setting in motion the quiet collapse of my mental health. The paradox of success in that moment would haunt me for years to come. 

After the immediate chaos settled, a false outrage fest unfolded inside. I tried to keep working, following up with various individuals who had previously been reluctant to go on camera. The mood was initially somber and solemn—a stunned silence hanging heavy over the crowd. But that atmosphere quickly shifted to something more casual, then turned angry as people began to question what was really happening. Attendees started to wonder where Geert Wilders and Pam Geller had gone, as private security quietly escorted them away. We were left in the gymnasium surrounded only by plainclothes officers and SWAT team members.

Separated from the leaders who had attracted them to this unfolding, thwarted attack like moths to a flame, many in the crowd began to grumble about the extent of their manipulation. Murmurs of confusion turned into frustrated debates; the tension was palpable. The event, held to honor white supremacist Dutch politician Geert Wilders and U.S.-based political provocateur Pam Geller, quickly slipped past the veneer of free speech into something far darker.

In the days that followed, I gave my second report from the scene live on-air. It was factual, direct, the kind of clean reporting that had always come naturally to me. But afterwards, I felt nothing. No sense of accomplishment, no relief at having survived. Only a hollowness that gnawed at the edges of my mind.

The idea that I had failed, that I had let fear steal my purpose, hit me in my chest and would not let go. I had to grieve the dream I manifested. 

Assignments came and went, but something in me had changed. I could still write, shoot, and conduct interviews, but the hunger was gone. I would break out in nervous sweats and tremble at the thought of loading a camera bag or charging a battery in preparation for a shoot. Crowds made my pulse quicken, sudden noises set my nerves on edge.

Other than by my assignment editor—who asked if I was okay the day after the incident in a tone that felt more like a 'cover your ass' gesture than genuine concern—I was largely met with disdain and jealousy from my peers and colleagues. Many of them had been in the business for decades and had never had breaking news happen to them, especially not something so brazen and newsworthy. In retrospect, her pity wasn’t for the trauma I had just endured; it was for what she knew was coming next—the judgment and dismissal I would face from the newsroom’s foot soldiers, the field production team, and leadership alike. 

Story after breaking news story rolled in, and as the body counts I reported on rose, I felt myself slipping farther away. After the incident, the emotional toll became undeniable. The creative process I had once cherished as an artist and journalist now stirred echoes of that day, each assignment like a tripwire for my trauma. For the first time in my life, the prospect of producing left me paralyzed. It was as though my voice—my ability to tell stories with clarity, empathy, and power—had been severed, replaced by a fear that silenced the very purpose that had once defined me.

But it was the nightclub shooting in Orlando that shook me the most. The June 2016 massacre at Pulse—where a lone gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in what was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the worst attack on the LGBTQ+ community—sent a new wave of shock through my already fragile psyche. The superlatives alone—deadliest, worst, most horrific—lodged themselves in my mind like shrapnel. It became harder to breathe, let alone bear witness to another tragedy through the lens of journalism. Producing news means acting as a net—catching facts, perspectives, and raw human emotion from every direction. So much of what we witness never airs, never gets published, but it still lives within us. The cutting room floor of my mind overflowed with discarded interviews, unspoken grief, and unresolved pain. We carry the words of others, their fears and traumas, sitting with them in our minds and bodies until they begin to fester. The weight of it all, unprocessed and constant, became too much to bear.

My loved ones—my father, my then-girlfriend, and my closest friends—began to notice the change in me first. They saw how I had withdrawn, how the smallest triggers would send me spiraling. After repeated pleas for me to seek professional help, I finally obliged. I sat across from a psychiatrist and told her everything I’ve just told you here. Her first recommendation devastated me: stop doing the work for which I had spent my entire adult life preparing. Journalism had been my identity, my compass. But this time, I wasn’t just left broken—I was handed a plan.

With that plan, I sought an accommodation with HR to shift away from breaking news and toward feature reporting. CNN was pivoting toward streaming and long-form digital content, and I had already begun pitching and producing more in-depth mini-docs that aligned with that direction. I found some peace in the slower pace and deeper storytelling. Around the same time, I also returned to yoga after a seven-year hiatus. What started as a form of stress relief soon grew into something more foundational—a step toward reclaiming control of my life and body.

Healing has a way of finding cracks to grow through. Therapy helped me name what I was going through, to give shape and structure to the invisible. And yoga—that quiet, persistent practice of breath and presence—became my lifeline. At first, it was just a way to calm my nerves. I found a local class, tucked into the upstairs offices of a local vegan eatery, and I went religiously, basking in the connection and community. Slowly, it taught me how to return to my body, to stand in the moment without fear.

What started as survival turned into passion. I began studying more deeply, eventually enrolling in a teacher training program. It wasn’t easy—confronting yourself never is—but somewhere in the stillness, I found fragments of the person I used to be. And with the help of those around me, especially my lovely wife, those fragments have formed into a beautiful mosaic.

Today's tapestry looks very different than before. I'm a certified yoga instructor, a documentary filmmaker, and a father. I now teach trauma-informed yoga sessions by appointment, focusing primarily on seniors and survivors. In that quiet, intentional space, I’ve rediscovered my purpose—not only in capturing other people's stories, but in helping them find the strength to rebuild their own.

The World Is My Sandbox: The Origin Story of Nature’s Griot

I began telling stories as a child, digging through my sandbox in the yard where I would imagine that if I dug long enough and deep enough I could really make it to China. If I found a fractured piece of pottery on my digging expedition, I would weave a tale to anyone that would listen about how it was an ancient artifact from long ago. I was hooked on telling stories to my family and friends and the feeling I got when I knew I blew their minds. My audience for my stories got bigger as I aged. Once I settled on journalism to make a living off my favorite pastime, I had to back up my lines with facts. 

Despite this shift, I still got a rush from producing a story and wanted that feeling to have meaning beyond ratings or raises for a job well done. Therefore, once I discovered environmental journalism was a real thing, I focused all my efforts to securing my future in that field. Sharing about the environment hit my highest pleasure points as a storyteller, talking about nature and people’s relationship to it. I first came across environmental journalism while working at CNN in 2011 when I was covering the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed one of Japan’s coastal nuclear energy hubs. The threat of contamination to people and wildlife on the island and hundreds of miles out to sea was massive. Even though the news cycle moved on, the full extent of the fallout from the radiation was still brewing. 

In 2014, I saw the same upswell of environmental interest in Flint, Michigan due to the deliberate contamination of drinking water with lead. I thought for sure environmental justice stories would be a mainstay in the public discourse. I began to notice a pattern. The public had more of an appetite for environmental journalism when a story had a sense of racial or social injustice. I thought to myself—if I could find the right story that checked those boxes then I would have something to pitch. 

In the soft and steamy marshes of Louisiana, I found just the story. In 2017—after nine months of research, pitching and revising—I found myself in a town called LaPlace. The home of one of America’s largest slave revolts is now home to America’s largest neoprene factory. The sprawling complex that manufactures the raw, soft, squishy material whose use is ubiquitous from car seats to bandaids also produces a byproduct that is known to cause cancer. The toxin this facility, formerly owned by DuPont, emits is chloroprene. 99% of this poisonous gas in the US comes from this building, and today, the majority-black town suffers from cancer at rates higher than any place in the state. 

Once we produced this story, that rush I felt as a child surged within. In this moment, I realized this was the next step in my path as a storyteller—to tell more stories like this. Around the same time, my mentor encouraged me to apply to a fellowship she took part in to help me do just that. The Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellowship, a program at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism, helps incubate the ideas of journalists like me to give their environmental story ideas a boost. The confirmation of this move came when I was accepted into the fellowship to dig deeper in an area I had been interested in for a long time — fishing!