Around nine months ago, during one of those highly satisfying admin days that come around no more than once in twelve months, I filled out the risk assessment for my Year Abroad. This is a standard form that every MML student has to complete, whether they’re off to study art history in Vienna or teach English in rural Colombia. It is mostly a tick-box exercise, rating the risk of financial troubles, pick-pocketing and volcanoes – high, medium, low.

I sped through the form, one eye on the telly – tick, tick, tick, sign. I appreciated it was necessary from a health and safety point of view, but scoffed at the idea that it might actually end up being relevant to my Year Abroad experience.

I huffed and puffed when forced to tick "high" risk next to “terrorism”. Simply quoting the advice on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website – maintain vigilance, be aware of suspicious activity – I resented being made to sound like the melodramatic paranoiac that I only slightly was. I prided myself in knowing, even as I ticked, that the personal risk to me was, realistically, rationally, next to nothing.

Maybe not. I am spending my Year Abroad living and working in Brussels, and that’s where I was a week ago on Tuesday 22nd March when members of the so-called Islamic State set off two bombs in the departures hall of Brussels Zaventem airport, and another on a metro train as it pulled out of Maelbeek station in the city’s European quarter. I was getting ready for work when the airport bombs happened, at 8 o’clock in the morning. And I was in the office when the second attack hit, an hour and a quarter later, on the station.

On that day, I felt like I’d had a lucky escape: I’d been at the airport 12 hours before the attacks there; Maelbeek is only 450m from where I work; the attack happened on the metro line I take to get to the office, at the next stop after I get off, just five or ten minutes after I’d disembarked.

But I hadn’t really. I’d only have been on the train that was blown up if I’d been running late. And the only way I would still have been on at Maelbeek is if I’d got so wrapped up in my Archers podcast that I’d missed my stop.

But it was all still a bit too close to home, nonetheless. A bit close, a bit real, a bit like something I’d had nightmares about.

Years Abroad are supposed to be challenging. They loom ahead of an MML student, until suddenly they’re there and real and more terrifying than you thought. And you thought they’d be pretty terrifying.

They are a year when 20 and 21-year-olds who are still prone to taking laundry home to be washed are sent out to Europe and beyond, on their own, to fend for themselves across linguistic and cultural barriers. For some (myself included), this will all be compounded by their first office job, negotiating the politics of the fridge and the air con for the very first time.

So yes, I was prepared for challenges. I was expecting to make a fool of myself by inadvertently announcing a not-real pregnancy to a shop assistant. I was expecting to ride the tram to beyond the end of the line before realising I was travelling in the wrong direction. And I was expecting to mess up the continental kisses and end up almost getting off with a stranger.

But, as my attitude towards that risk assessment attested, I wasn’t expecting bombs in the city I now call home. I wasn’t expecting to have the streets and public transport patrolled by heavily armed soldiers. And I wasn’t expecting to have to use the Facebook safety check feature to let my friends know that I was still alive.

That said, however, I feel kind of OK. My heart breaks for the victims, their families, the people who feel as though the city of Brussels runs in their veins. I feel angry, sad, confused. But also OK.

For someone who spends a good chunk of their everyday life fighting to keep anxiety over terrorism at bay – who, during the Brussels lockdown in November, actually wrote a letter, addressed to loved ones, in case I died – to have lived, the answer to that question I’ve asked myself so many times – what’s the worst that could happen? – and feel all the standard human responses to evil and tragedy, but none of the mind-twisting anxiety I thought would accompany them, feels like a victory. Not a victory I’m celebrating – it’s all too awful for that. Just silently, proudly, acknowledging, all the while mourning the horrendous events that have happened on my doorstep.

This year abroad is a challenge – in ways I predicted, and ways I didn’t – but a challenge I am facing and overcoming. A challenge I am not allowing to overwhelm me. And, as the flowers, candles and posters adorning the Bourse in the city centre show, Brussels is doing the same.