It's good to reflect every once in a while on how we’ve arrived to where we are. The choices we’ve made. Things that have happened to us.

Sometimes I tell people I won the lottery of life experience.

A big reason for that luck is that I’ve chosen unfamiliar paths, put myself in uncomfortable situations, never tried to avoid new experiences or people who were different than me. That led me to many unexpected opportunities. And later some problems.

I don't know if I’d make all those same choices today.

It's a very different world, and there are two threats germane to this book that I will address here—one to our personal sense of liberty, and the other to journalism.

When I was in my twenties, I traveled a lot. I had visited forty countries by the time I was twenty-five. The dollar was historically strong, and international travel had never been so accessible to so many young people.

Using my blue passport felt to me like a very American thing to do. To explore. Push beyond what I knew. Engage with people of different languages, cultures, and beliefs. It may not feel like it today, but those are core American values—always have been.

If my dad were alive and here today and you had the chance to talk to him, you’d quickly notice that he had a strong command of the English language and American idioms. But he also had a very thick accent.

So naturally people would ask him, “Where are you from?”

And he would say, “I’m Iranian by birth, and I’m American by choice, and I’m proud of both.”

In a world where we’ve been told those two cultures are incompatible with each other, the idea that you could hold these supposed conflicting identities simultaneously became a guiding principle for me.

In 2009 I moved to Iran, one of the least free countries in the world—the country where my late father was born.

I went there to work as a journalist. And I was pretty good at it. Good enough that I got one of the dream journalism jobs as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post.