Rikki Ratliff-Fellman

As I stated in my brother’s obituary, freelance storm chasing was a form of therapy for him. He got paid for it and I know for a fact he helped save many lives, for which I am very proud. This passion—touching the wild edges of destruction—also gave him the professional cover to be a little crazy. Perhaps these storms were a physical manifestation of the battle happening inside his mind.

It was a wistful goodbye to that chapter of my life behind the wheel, but I still get tune-ups. It just that these days, they're for my feet. Pedicures are not a luxury anymore. It's just mandatory upkeep for my new wheels. A little over a year later, I'm fully pedestrian and loving every step of it. I can hail taxis with the best of them, and navigate the subway tunnels with near ease. I walk to work every day and never grow bored of it.

“We don’t have a reporter position available, but we do need a senior producer for Ezra Levant,” Sun News Network management told me during my 2011 interview. “Who’s Ezra Levant? ” I wondered. But I was too hungry to waffle, so I gobbled up the offer. It’s a rare thing for a journalist to get in on the ground floor of a new media venture, especially one so audacious and plucky. Once I’d gone home to Google this “Ezra Levant,” I wondered what the hell I was getting into.