I was halfway up a cliff in northern Oman when I realized I hadn’t thought about my prosthesis in more than an hour—which, if you’ve ever worn one, you’ll know is no small thing. The socket was slick with sweat against my thigh. The ridge of my liner had started to roll slightly, but not enough to make me stop. I’d already hiked for five hours that day and was now hauling myself—and my leg—up the blunt edge of a rock face.
A steel cable snaked along the cliff, bolted in intervals above a sliver of a ledge. Below, a drop that would turn your stomach inside out if you dared to look down. I didn’t. I wasn’t scared. Or rather, I was, but not of falling. I was scared that after such an intense day, my reserves were starting to slip, that the engine was sputtering just as the terrain got harder. But the adrenaline didn’t care. It surged forward, dragging me with it, past the point where reason said stop.
Solo travel comes with a strange kind of liberty. People project onto it: courage, loneliness, madness. It’s none of those things. When I travel alone, I’m not someone’s daughter or patient or quiet cause for concern. I’m not “the woman with one leg”. I’m just Zainab.
This wasn’t my first solo trip. I’d wandered the alleyways of Jordan, roamed Istanbul, gotten lost on purpose in countless cities. I’d learned how to pack light, how to listen to my body, how to push it past the borders of comfort. Yet Oman was different. There was something elemental about it all: the land stripped to its bones, the quiet confidence of the men I’d found online to hike with, the challenge I’d set for myself. Not to prove anything. Just to see what I could do.
But I didn’t always know I could do this. There was a time when I didn’t even know I had a choice—not about travel, or mountains, but about how to exist. I was seven. We were in the garden of our house in Baghdad. It was hot, still. I was fiddling with the handlebars of my bike, which were damaged and needed to be fixed, and my dad came out to help. My youngest sister was on the swing nearby. We found a piece of scrap metal in the garage—something heavy, solid. He thought it might help. It looked like a screw. It wasn’t.