To write or not to write?
As I navigate my second semester of college, I am finding myself doing a lot of reflection and introspection. For one thing, I'm in an Intensive Outpatient Program to continue to work through my mental illnesses, so I'm kind of forced to. But even aside from that, I didn't realize how much being thrust into a new, cutthroat environment without my parents' direct support would threaten a sense-of-self I naively believed was fully developed. As I reckon with the questions about who I am, I continue to come back to my identity as a writer.
For most of high school, I wrote and edited for the student run newspaper, the Forecaster. Forecaster started out as my first social community in high school and was a place I built up confidence because I knew I added value to the team. And to its credit, it remained that safe space for me for the better part of three years. In a lot of ways, journalism was my saving grace because I finally had a hobby/passion I felt I was good at, as opposed to gymnastics where I was always behind. Forecaster was also the first place I proudly identified as a lesbian, as opposed to middle school where I pretended to have crushes on boys and told people I was bisexual.
Eventually, things changed dramatically.
TW: brief mention of suicide
As I navigate my second semester of college, I am finding myself doing a lot of reflection and introspection. For one thing, I'm in an Intensive Outpatient Program to continue to work through my mental illnesses, so I'm kind of forced to. But even aside from that, I didn't realize how much being thrust into a new, cutthroat environment without my parents' direct support would threaten a sense-of-self I naively believed was fully developed. As I reckon with the questions about who I am, I continue to come back to my identity as a writer.
For most of high school, I wrote and edited for the student run newspaper, the Forecaster. Forecaster started out as my first social community in high school and was a place I built up confidence because I knew I added value to the team. And to its credit, it remained that safe space for me for the better part of three years. In a lot of ways, journalism was my saving grace because I finally had a hobby/passion I felt I was good at, as opposed to gymnastics where I was always behind. Forecaster was also the first place I proudly identified as a lesbian, as opposed to middle school where I pretended to have crushes on boys and told people I was bisexual.
Eventually, things changed dramatically. I was heavily involved in the investigation and writing process for a censored sexual harassment article published in 2023. As a survivor of both physical sexual assault and many of the digital forms of sexual harassment the article touched on, it was distressing to see administration much more concerned with protecting the perpetrators' wellbeing than that of the victims'. It was even more distressing to see my peers, whom I held to the highest standards of journalistic integrity, crumble under the pressure and prioritize maintaining a cordial relationship with admin over fully covering the stories people bravely shared with us. When some of my peers spoke up months later, it proved to me there was remorse for succumbing to and initially vehemently denying any censorship occurred. After some distance from the situation, I have much more compassion for the decisions my peers made. I better understand now how the executive team had an obligation to think about the future of the Forecaster in a way I didn't and we were all dealing with what might be a very difficult situation for professional journalists, let alone student journalists with barely a few years of experience. At the same time, I wish some of the demeaning comments about me hadn't been made (namely "Do you realize how much you're inconveniencing us by stepping down?" and the rumors spread about how I didn't care about male mental health).
If you combine the build up of this situation with the huge blow to my self worth that was losing the editor-in-chief race a month prior and my preexistent mental health issues, you get a near suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. After how traumatized I felt by my last few months in Forecaster, I swore off journalism for life. I would never put myself in that environment again.
However, I do deeply miss journalistic writing, particularly the publication aspect since I'm very passionate about social change and journalism was the vehicle through which I saw myself making a concrete difference in the world. I still do write for myself and of course there's value in that (for example, i think writing is the best way to sort through your own opinion on a complex subject) but the paramount reason I enjoyed tackling the tough subjects through in-depth analyses was because i saw the impact — whether it was as simple as amplifying a previously suppressed voice or in a few instances, directly contributing to policy change or community-wide mobilization. In a phrase, journalism gave me purpose, more so than anything ever has.
Anyway, all of this is to say, despite the paralyzing fear, I really want to get back to journalism eventually. I was good at it and more importantly, I loved it. Creating this website feels like an intermediate step. I’ll be able to get comfortable with my writing having an audience again but in a safe, contained space.
Thank you for being here to support me in my journey to find my voice again.