TW: this story mentions sensitive topics including school shootings.
I think there was a pen in my hand when I was born, as I can never recall a time when I wasn’t writing. I would read my mom the stories I would write as a child, many of them retellings of popular stories like “Phineas and Ferb” or “Star Wars,” even an original novella based on the music video for “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. Others were scary stories because I watched horror movies too early for my age, and my mom often asked if I could write something cute about bunnies instead (I never did).
Writing was always something I knew I could do. It was one thing I was confident about, teachers telling me I had a voice and interesting diction, creating a Dickinsian superiority complex that has now lasted me my whole life, whether that be for the better or for the worst.
As I grew up, like any other apathetic pre-teen, I lost interest in anything other than making sure I had friends and an iPhone 4S, leaving my notebook behind for a couple of years while I became an awkward band kid. Yet, my emotions betrayed me as I came into my teen years, ravaged by puberty and friends getting meaner and falling in and out of love with the boy who played trumpet in front of you, even if you had only spoken a handful of times. With this, I refound poetry to channel all of these 13-year-old emotions.
Now, this is not to say I am some Shakespeare; I am unfortunately more of a Rupi Kaur, writing little blurbs that only make sense to me that would look a little silly if I printed them into a book. But that is what is most important about my process of writing poetry, it is just for me. My Notes app is full of notes and my bookshelf at home is filled with countless notebooks, filled with poetry ranging in topics from my first kiss to my first friend group, to harder situations I have had to deal with like grief from a family death.
Poetry has gotten me through it all, one tear dropping on my phone and making it glitch at a time. It gets out my thoughts without anyone having to edit or have critical thoughts on it, as poetry is up to subjectivity, my excuse for something being bad, but I don’t want to change it because what I feel is most important. Poetry is exclusively and unapologetically me.
I thought I wanted to go to school for screenwriting, go into a film major and write pretentious arthouse films for the rest of my life. It was only when I was going through a creative drought that I realized that working towards a goal that only nepotism babies ever reach would not fulfill me. I liked speaking the truth, I liked interacting with people, and I liked real stories. So naturally, I took the Rory Gilmore route and found journalism.
More like journalism found me. I tripped into jobs and opportunities to write, falling in love more with every byline. In the last two years, I have interviewed people I didn’t dream of meeting, the most surreal being Renee Elise Goldsberry from “Hamilton,” idolizing her like any other theater kid. Journalism has given me the confidence I never thought I would be able to find, being able to talk to any person without fear. Covering community politics has given power to others that I never thought I could enact. Journalism has changed my life for the better, even if it has swallowed my life and interests whole.
There was a moment in time when I was not sure what I would have done without journalism in my life: the month of February this past year. When tragedy struck MSU, I was distraught, feeling powerless and as if all the hope for the spring semester had been drained away, nothing to do but watch my peers and I grapple for any sort of normalcy. I did the knee-jerk reaction of immediately shoving myself in my work, wanting to cover other’s stories, the only thing I really knew how to do.
In the week after the shooting, I wrote seven stories in seven days. I went to multiple protests, talked to people about gun violence, and even found stories to write about hope in a time of immense sorrow and grief. I am not sure what I would have done without leaning on writing and storytelling during this time, giving me something to think about other than how scared I was in my dorm. With every “thank you for this story,” I was reinforced that this job was my purpose, taking what writing did for me and giving it to others.
Writing in any form has given me a creative outlet to express myself and express the opinions of others, learning more about myself and every community I come in contact with in every byline and poem. Sometimes I look at myself as a one-trick pony, writing being the one thing I know I am truly capable of, but writing is so much more than one skill; it is my passion and the one thing to separate myself from my emotions is putting it down on paper.
Writing has been my go-to activity on my hardest days, and I could not be more thankful for the emotional coping skills it has gifted me. Everything I put on the internet still makes me nervous, even 100 bylines later, but I know that even if journalism fails me or makes me crazy or makes me cry, writing down my feelings will be timeless and always just for me.