“I’m a blogger,” I say instead of the word with a j – a mix of activism, reactivism and news. The distinction seems important. I rarely stop to check the accuracy of my statement because I feel my cause so intensely. See, a journalist wouldn’t write that sentence, right?
“I’m not a journalist” is a phrase I feel like I’ve said a million times, mostly to reporters or other people interviewing me. Journalism is a craft, an art form, a profession that requires training and education and knowledge of grammar. By that, I don’t mean that you need a master’s degree for it; education can take many forms, some of which are perseverance and persistent hard work, listening to more experienced people, and investing time.
A few years ago, I asked an author who wrote for a now defunct media outlet about a factual error in his article. After a few conversations, he said that the “new journalism” does not focus on facts and official statements.
I definitely didn’t want to become a newbie in journalism.
In the writing years
In high school, we read a lot of great literature, but we didn’t write much. Summaries to make sure we understood the texts, not analyses. But there were moments—I was sitting on a lawn chair in the front yard toward the end of my senior year, reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for my three-page essay. When Hermes and Thoth smacked me on the head, I drew a real parallel between JC and my all-time favorite novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I doodled furiously before the thought floated away, got an A+ on my paper, and then ripped the AP English exam with a resounding score that knocked me out of freshman year of college. Bam.
Of course, I don’t remember that thought now – it was 36 years ago. But I remember that feeling. I can close my eyes and go right back to that moment. It was exhilarating. And then it was over when I went to college.
Since I had to skip English 101, I had to take more advanced classes that focused on writing. To my secret delight, an essay I wrote about my high school trigonometry class got published. Still, I was busy scrimping on the margins or saying nothing at all on many subordinate clauses (there it is!) when I had no idea what the heck to say.
Everything changed in my penultimate year of Microeconomics. We had to write our exam answers in the blue book. I did pretty well. My teacher told me I was the only student who used an introductory paragraph and conclusion. She said it wasn’t necessary. Obviously, I continued to do just that because I liked the idea of being an above-average writer.
Still, I graduated college with only mediocre writing skills overall. I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I faced my nemesis – graduate school. I didn’t belong in graduate school because I had no interest. When I switched my focus to political philosophy, things got exciting. I wrote 2 or 3 essays a week and revised 1 or 2 with lots of tough feedback from my professors. All I did was read and write and drink beer at the local political science/sociology bars.
Fake sentences during studies
Not every paper was great or even good, but I had my moments. It was the baptism of fire through ink cartridges. Then came my master’s thesis. I was in this program where I was doing a master’s degree and a doctorate at the same time. I don’t know why I agreed to that.
I chose the topic of “Art and Politics in the Writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn” and dove in. I loved Russian writers. I didn’t read in Russian. Nevertheless, I was so moved by Dostoyevsky’s passage about the suffering of children in The Brothers Karamazov. I plunged into a spiral, poring over every single work by Solzhenitsyn, looking for the same orientation, the same moral clarity.
Can you imagine what all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago do to the mind of a 23-year-old young woman? Besides, my mind was breaking as the medications used to treat my supposed unipolar depression were slowly inducing a monstrous mania that left me locked in the closet and begging for help. I packed up my Solzhenitsyn books and fled to Western Kentucky.
I wrote letters for that job and suddenly realized that I could damn well write. The words just poured out of me. I went back to school and started working in social services. I wrote and wrote and wrote. My boss forbade me from using semicolons, hyphens, and eventually ellipsis. There was a catch-all jar in the office for grammatical and spelling errors.
The men tried to silence me
I moved on to other jobs. My favorite boss told me to tone down my writing because I set the bar too high. He also told me to take the AP English out of my speaking because I made other people feel stupid. Another boss told me that my writing conveyed emotion and that wasn’t the point of writing. When he banned me from using adverbs, the silence had built up even more pressure in my poor, broken mind and I knew I couldn’t work. The silence created anxiety and made me doubt my ability to communicate.
I was still producing content for letters, newsletters, group emails, and my blog. But I was broken inside and running out of words. Writing terrified me. It reminded me of being told as a child not to write anything down that other people could read. So I never kept a journal. I had some, but I just left the pages blank as I desperately tried to process my life without this important skill.
After giving up paid work, it took me about two years to find my voice again. It seems that writing memorial posts gave me a new sense of purpose, a space where adverbs and polysyllabic words had value. In this space, I used words to evoke emotions, not to suppress them.
I wrote for other publications, hoping to learn from different editors, but most of the time they just let me go and slowed me down to correct spelling mistakes. Other editors kept me on my toes, and four or eight staffers fought over every little thing – it was very confusing. I felt punished or stupid, because there was definitely a space in between where the editors were helping me learn, rather than being petty.
When the media disappeared, so did the opportunities for “citizen journalism.” But I had my blog. So I’m fine.
Now I see that I had the necessary training and experience (in my opinion) to identify as a journalist. I’ve spent some time around journalists over the past year. I fit in. They don’t judge me for my failure to write our numbers or my semicolon fetish. They certainly don’t try to silence me.
Wikipedia sees the journalist in me
Do you know why I did that? Some editor at Wikipedia who repeatedly removed “is an American journalist” from my wiki.
So I officially take on the title of journalist. No, I claim the identity I have earned since that day when I sat curled up in a deck chair and wrote about Shakespeare and Solzhenitsyn with enthusiasm, joy and a rush of adrenaline that led me down my winding path. A path that was not meant literally, but a metaphor for my rightful place in the world.
It is important to stress that while it has been mostly men who have tried to silence me, there are also several male journalists who have inspired me and believed in me. I will not name names (except Chris Potter). You probably know who the nice, decent and talented storytellers are in your newspapers, on your computers and even some on TV. Some of them are men.
In closing, I would like to quote one of my favorite quotes: “So it shall be written, so it shall be done.”
