Daily Inspiration Quote by Åsne Seierstad

War reporting doesn’t just require courage; it requires an almost surgical relationship with your own nervous system. Seierstad’s line is a blunt, chilling metaphor for that self-surgery: fear isn’t “overcome” in some inspirational way, it’s removed, packaged, and stored. A freezer is domestic, ordinary, almost banal - exactly the point. She turns terror into something you can compartmentalize like leftovers, because the alternative is paralysis.

The intent is practical, not poetic. “When I decided” is the key repetition: staying in Iraq is framed as an active choice, then immediately followed by the mental mechanism that makes the choice survivable. It’s a journalist describing an internal workflow. Fear becomes a bodily substance you can relocate, implying dissociation without romanticizing it. She doesn’t claim to be fearless; she claims to be functional.

The subtext is ethical as much as psychological. A reporter in a war zone is supposed to observe, remember, translate. But fear hijacks attention and distorts perception; it makes you see only exit routes and threats. Freezing it is a bid for clarity - and for professionalism - even if it risks numbness. That image also quietly acknowledges what gets sacrificed: if you can freeze fear, you can freeze other feelings, too.

Context matters: Iraq as a post-2003 landscape where danger is ambient and unpredictable, not a single battlefield you can mentally clock in and out of. The freezer becomes a portable coping strategy for a place where there is no safe room, only the ongoing decision to keep going.