I dropped off the face of the Earth.
The last 11 months have been incredibly confusing for me. A year ago, I was a (struggling) college student, I was with someone I could legitimately see spending the rest of my life with, I had clear goals… I was writing. Now, as October 2013 wanes, I’m a college dropout, single (as a result of my own poor choices) and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I’m also not writing nearly as much as I was when I could churn out a weekly column and a news story with (relative) regularity.
I don’t think this is a coincidence. After all, you can’t gain anything vital without first giving something up in return.[1] I’m just not sure what I’ve gained.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what drove me to pursue journalism: frustration, angst and a overriding desire to see good things happen to good people and justice happen to… not-so-good people. I was a literal child of the War on Terror, only nine years old on Sept. 11, so a good deal of the context of that war – why George Bush was so loathsome – is (at least partially) lost on me. It was only after reading about the heinous things the government had done in the name of stopping terrorism — when I was 15 — that I started to piece together my own worldview and sense of ethics.
When I started listening to punk rock, I was hit with doses of similar angry sentiments from the ages — Jello Biafra and his multi-presidential rage, Chumbawamba and their critiques of the British government under Margaret Thatcher, and on and on. This context mixed with the seemingly silly frustrations of a young teenager to form a unique species of troublemaker that I’m not sure my school’s administrators had any idea how to handle. Vandalism they understood; political pamphleteering was foreign to them.
I started out as a Yearbook kid. When I got into high school, I had a camera and access to decent telephoto lenses and liked sports well enough, so I volunteered to shoot photos of football and cross country for the yearbook. This turned into a sports photo editorship during my sophomore year – which turned out to be both a boon and a bane. It was in sixth hour that I discovered my penchant for tyrannical behavior if given even a modicum of managerial power. I also discovered that I was… not great at editing photos. Looking back at the yearbook I helped produce induces more than a couple of cringes. Nevertheless, photography seemed like a worthwhile pursuit, so I went after it full-bore.
That said, I decided to cut my yearbook career short after sophomore year. I needed to refocus and get away from an environment which felt (to me) toxic. I was not the most reliable narrator, but that’s not the point. I went down the hall and asked the newspaper teacher if I could become a photographer for the school paper.
She shot me down.
It felt like a slap in the face. Here I was producing great (not really) content for the school yearbook, but the newspaper wouldn’t have me?! I was devastated. But the journalism teacher hadn’t finished with me.
“If you want to be on the newspaper,” she said (paraphrasing; it’s been ages), “You’re going to have to go through journalism class. Everyone else on the staff did. So do you.”
I was grumbly, but she was right. So I enrolled in the elective class during the fall of my junior year. To be incredibly cliche, my experience in the class was like going from a black-and-white silent film to Technicolor with Dolby surround sound. It was there that I discovered that I was actually okay at writing and decent at copy editing. I discovered that an important aspect of journalism is making a connection with both the subject(s) of a story as well as the reader.
The class was also where I developed a pretty bad habit of mine of needing to transcribe every word an interviewee said during a session so that I didn’t miss any context.
I still haven’t broken that habit. I need help with it.
This journalism class, supposed to be a trial run, ignited me. I didn’t develop a love for journalism so much as I became obsessed with it. The flame struck in 2008 still burns, but lately it’s been more of an ember than a conflagration. Hopefully, as I resume this column and begin slowly working my way through the city, covering more and more stories as I go, that flame will grow again.
- Sorry for the Fullmetal Alchemist reference. It made sense in my head.↩︎