I remember when touring prospective colleges as a high school senior there was one element of the institution that each university spent a great deal of time promoting: study abroad.

That always struck me as strange. If your school is so great, why are you spending so much time telling prospective students how much fun they will have somewhere else? However, I see the point of promoting study abroad. If a university gives you the chance to travel to somewhere you’d probably never go under different circumstances – often at a discounted price – why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

Now in my final year at St. Thomas, I’ve been asked countless times by friends and faculty if I’ve studied abroad during my college career. For three years, my response has always been the same: unfortunately, no. I’d always had my senior J-term targeted as my eventual chance to spend a month abroad. Fortunately that’s become the case, and I’ll be traveling to London in a few weeks.

When I applied and was accepted for the trip, I got a good deal of ribbing from friends of mine for not being daring enough with my travel ambitions. The friendly criticism often went something like, “Come on, London? That’s basically the United States. Don’t you want to try to experience something a lot more different? When else are you going to have the chance to travel to (insert remote location)?”

In the weeks since the Paris terror attacks, the tone of many of those same people has changed when discussing travel to a previously blasé destination.

Now the conversation usually goes more like, “London, huh? Have your professors or anyone from study abroad talked to you about how to stay safe over there?” Somehow my trip to Western Europe suddenly seems more daring than my roommate’s J-term in Ecuador.

My response to comments like these is usually the same. I point out that authorities will be on higher alert and more wary of terrorism following the Paris attacks, and that you could argue Europe is safer now than it might have been before the attacks. It’s an oversimplified – and perhaps incorrect – assertion, but it moves the conversation along and circumvents the much more frightening reason why those attacks haven’t changed how I’m preparing for my trip.

This is just the type of world I’ve lived in. The most vivid memory of my early childhood is of standing in the living room of my childhood home waiting for the school bus on September 11, 2001. I remember the “Today” show playing as I asked my confused mother how a pilot could fly so far off course that he or she would hit a building. We then watched a plane hit the second tower before I shuffled out the door and off to school.

I remember a lot of things about the rest of that day, but my three younger siblings don’t. For every U.S. citizen my age and younger, a post-9/11 world is all we know. The war on terror has lasted as long as our memory can stretch.

As I watched coverage of the Paris attacks on CNN, I tried to wrap my head around the fact that no “terrorists” have succeeded in attacking the U.S. since 9/11. For all we hear about ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and Hezbollah, one could say that exactly zero people have died in zero terrorist attacks orchestrated by those groups on U.S. soil in over 14 years. But that’s missing the point and overlooking what terrorism actually is.

I’m not worried about doing extra preparation for a terrorist attack in London because I’m already waiting for a domestic attack at any moment. While a foreign terrorist hasn’t successfully attacked the U.S. since 9/11, hundreds of domestic terrorists have during that span in the form of school shootings and attacks on other public places. We hear news daily about ISIS and terrorism abroad, but it’s the threat at home that keeps me wary every second of the day.

Here’s an example: I sat down to do a brief homework assignment in the student center one evening last week. I read through maybe a page or two of the assignment before I looked around, realized I was in an open and heavily-trafficked building and decided to move to one of the upper floors of the library where I could quickly find cover if someone decided to start shooting.

I’m constantly on edge. If I’m in class and hear a sudden loud noise – a door slamming, a dropped textbook in another room – I listen for a few moments afterward, waiting for a second noise that could potentially be gunshots. I look around for hiding places and make plans to close, lock and barricade a door if I’m in an office or classroom. It takes at least a minute before I’m finally able to once again focus on the lecture happening in front of me or fully able to participate in a conversation.

Now, I know it’s highly unlikely that this scenario will actually happen and I admit I’m a bit more jumpy than most people, but I don’t think it’s wrong or excessive to constantly be planning for that outcome – one that has become increasingly more likely in recent years.

This thought darts through my mind for just a moment when someone asks, “Do you think you’ll be safe in London?”

The honest answer is yes, but I don’t count on it, and I won’t be any more unsafe than I am here. I won’t be any more on edge or wary of my surroundings or any less expectant of someone pulling a firearm from his or her jacket than I already am. Even in St. Paul, I tense up a bit more than normal when passing a stranger and quicken my pace when I walk by a car that’s been idling a bit longer than normal.

As I write this out, it seems ridiculous that I’d think this way and behave so apprehensively, but this is the world our generation has grown up with. Just look at the news in the last two weeks of shootings at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, at protests in Minneapolis and, most recently, in San Bernardino, California. We’re told that terrorists around the world are constantly plotting to kill Americans in the U.S. and abroad, yet, we’re no more safe at home.

Jacob Sevening can be reached at seve8586@stthomas.edu.