no turning back now

One of the things that used to scare me, almost to the point of turning me off, about being a journalist was how much depressing shit you learn about what's going on in the world. Things other people can just ignore unless they have a reason to know it too. I used to subscribe (though I'd never admit it at the time) to the theory that if you ignore, it will go away. Maybe it will even cease to exist, and we can go on in our little comfort zones, our little places of imagined reality that we create for ourselves so we can pretend we aren't scared out of our minds for the future, for the fate of our planet, and for what happens in real tragedies, and, of course, after this life.

You can't do that when you're a journalist. Maybe you can if you're limited to magazines about fashion or fine dining. And I'm not knocking those people; I kind of envy them sometimes. But at least in the world of newspapers, life is about as real as it gets. Depending on what you cover, you can see fatal car wrecks, terminally ill children, environmental disasters, heinous crimes, and people just being flat out ridiculous, stupid, and mean to each other. The other reporter at my work says you just have to not let yourself think about it and do your job. That's true, and actually easy enough to do in the moment. But it can be hard to separate your own humanness from what you're covering sometimes too.

Another side-effect of being a journalist is becoming more interested and in-tune to national and world news. I've always been mildly interested (I don't think I would've entered this field if I wasn't), but I wasn't a regular follower until I began looking at news from the inside out. And so, consequently, I've learned about all kinds of things that terrify me, including but not limited to the ever-looming effects of climate change, the fragile economy, irreconcilable differences between Republicans and Democrats, and the list goes on. I'm interested in the news both as a concerned member of planet Earth and as an up and coming journalist trying to hone my skills. However, I can no longer find solace in the lie that these catastrophes are geographically far away or at some indiscernible point in the future that, according to my lie, will never actually arrive.

The joke would be on me, if I continued down that path. I'm too connected to it now. I'm all in. I'm no longer a displaced English major who just wants any excuse to write for a living. I'm really a journalist. And it's my job, my duty, to be aware of terrible things (and good, encouraging ones too, but for purposes of this blog, I'm making a point) and to raise awareness so that readers stay informed and have the power to make good decisions. I'm not writing for myself anymore, I'm writing for the world. And as egotistical as that sounds, I really believe it and for the first time, I feel like I'm doing what I always wanted deep down--making a difference.

(I want to leave what I've written above as it is but I feel I owe it to the woman I interviewed this morning and to my (if any) readers to mention that I came to these realizations, although I'd been on my way to them for awhile, because of something she said to me. She was telling me about her four year old grandson who was just diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and will probably be in a wheelchair by age 12. She gave me a diagram of how children with MD tend to get up from the floor, using their hands because of muscular damage to their legs. Her point was that her grandson had been doing that, and it was one of the things that tipped off the doctor to have him tested for MD. She wanted me to print the diagram with the story, and she said, "If other people see this, and they see a child doing this, they'll know something might be wrong." That was when I knew that this was more than getting people to donate to the Muscular Dystrophy Association or have sympathy for an unfortunate little boy. This was a way to potentially help someone make their life better by having all the information. I'm going to try to remember that on all my assignments.)