I was 24 and I had just been dumped. On heartbroken impulse, I bought a $139 last minute red-eye flight to London - purchased by phone from an airline bucket shop that advertised in the back pages of the Village Voice! - to go see the closing performance of a show a bunch of my friends were doing on the West End. I begged the boss at my temp job to let me off an hour early so I could take the cheap airport bus to JFK instead of paying for taxi. She relented, I ran to the pickup spot near Port Authority, and I made the bus just as the driver was closing the doors. We were just entering the Lincoln Tunnel when I looked up, clocked where we were, and said, much too loudly and already starting to panic cry, "IS THIS BUS GOING TO NEWARK???"

By the time we were out on the Jersey side of the tunnel, the woman next to me had her cell phone out and, after looking it up in her filofax, had the British Airlines reservations number keyed in and was ready to hit call. The guy behind me had given me his handkerchief, and the driver of the bus was calling his dispatcher to see if he could transfer me back to an NYC-bound bus at the toll plaza.

In the end, the BA operator who answered when I used the lady's cellphone laughed and said she could transfer my ticket to an EWR-LHR flight. The guy behind me patted me on the shoulder. The driver drove on. I cried again, still, most of the way to the airport. Just feeling so dumb and so lucky.

I arrived at Abuja airport at midnight with no phone, no internet access, and no USD or NGN money. My work told me to expect a driver to pick me up, but he did not arrive. I had the hotel address where I was staying, but no idea how to get there. A bunch of taxi drivers saw me lost and descended on me (just hoping for a ride and cash). A husband and wife at the airport fought off the taxi drivers and gave me a ride to the hotel. I got to my office on Monday, and it turned out the driver had been given the wrong day. I am grateful for that couple. I have many stories of the kindness of people in Nigeria.

When I was about 25, I had what can only be described as a nervous breakdown while on a trip to visit a friend in Ethiopia. Travel has always triggered my OCD and health anxiety, but I had stupidly decided to go on this trip during a period of my life when I believed I no longer needed medication to manage my symptoms. Huge mistake. I spent the two weeks there convinced that I was on the brink of death, barely eating or sleeping, quietly hyperventilating and compulsively checking my pulse in the backseat of my friend’s car as we traveled through the (extraordinarily beautiful) countryside.

I desperately wanted to go home, but the idea of the 16 hour return flight was almost more than I could bear. I’m an extremely anxious flyer, and I was convinced (in my panicked state of mind) that I would have a medical emergency on the flight and nobody would be able to help me.

So there I was, standing in line to board the plane, quietly hyperventilating and compulsively checking my pulse. A woman in line next to me turned and asked if I was ok. I immediately started to cry, and everything came pouring out— my exhaustion and panic and shame and terror that I would die on the flight. This woman took my hand and told me that she was a paramedic and that she would switch seats to be next to me for the whole flight. She talked me through the first aid kits that most airplanes have on board. She held my hand during takeoff, and told me I could wake her up at any time during the flight if I got too scared.

It still makes me cry to think about it, nearly 15 years later. I don’t know her name, and I wish I could reach out and let her know how much her kindness meant to me. It’s hard to express to folks who don’t have severe anxiety how miserably lonely it is to be in the throes of panic. I mean it literally when I say that in that moment, I felt like she saved my life.

There was a NYT trend story about the "Quarter-Life Crisis" that came out in the early 2000s when I was in my early 20s. The paper published my letter saying the whole concept was ridiculous because it takes time to build things. I was chronically unemployed and single and everything else and feeling in crisis myself. I did not believe my own letter.

Back then, my number was in the white pages. I got a call one night from a woman who had read the letter and looked up my number. It was like getting a phone call from God. I don't recall much of our conversation, but for the past 25 years I have remembered these words: "You're going to have a great life."

So far, she's been right.