Stéphanie Surrugue

Stéphanie Surrugue, a Danish journalist with a French father who competed in the 1960 Rome Olympics, describes herself as someone who has learned to make choices only through painful experience. As a young woman, she imagined her life as a paper plane thrown into a current—moving forward, but without direction. That changed when she nearly married a man she loved but knew she could not make happy. Ending the engagement, she says, cost everyone involved dearly, but it forced her to spend nearly a year rebuilding herself into the person she actually wanted to be.

The steering wheel that pulls

Surrugue uses a metaphor she picked up from another person: driving a car and feeling the steering wheel pull slightly to one side. You may not notice it at first, but eventually the car drifts toward the curb, and you have to straighten out. She applies this to the major decisions in her life—the relationships she stayed in too long, the career path she followed without questioning whether it was her own. Her father’s death when she was 20 was the first violent "before and after." Later, reporting in Haiti exposed her to so much death that she considered quitting journalism entirely. Each of these moments forced a recalibration.