Why a Journalist?

As I prepare to graduate, I keep getting asked the same questions.

What will you do after school?

Where are you going to live?

How are you going to pay back your loans?

I give the average remedial response of 'I have no idea'.

I literally have NO actual clue what any of these classes have or have not prepared me for.

I am terrified and I do not want to leave the comfort of my college apartment, my teachers that support me and my friends. I do not know where I am going to go, if I'll get a room mate or be out on the street. All I know is that I want to write.

That is the only certainty that I can confirm without crying and trying to fight off anxiety attacks.

I just love the way my words look printed out for the world to see, it's as if writing lets me be in thousands of places at once, my voice heard by strangers that will never get to eat with me at lunch or watch me cry during Avenger movies, but yet they know me. They have read my mind, literally. My thoughts, my feelings, my research being given to them and they receive it.

On paper I don't have to be black or student or female. I can just be a writer, a mind actively and passionately writing down my worldview hoping that my perspective makes someone look at one topic, one person, one event just a little differently.

I get to use language like a make-up box, defining the article with my blunt statements while adding quotes to define the structure.

People used to ask me "oh, you like to write, have you ever thought about Journalism" and I said sure with no thought, no fight, no actual idea of what Journalism was.

And my first article sucked.

I still cant pass a grammar test in a print online news class with over an 82% and yet I am about to graduate college!

And all I can do is blame myself.

The first time I saw my name in print my heart did something I never felt before, and though some people might have just confused it as misplaced congestion, I knew that was not the last time I would see my name in copy passed around for the world to see.

Yet the deadlines, the grammar, the AP style book and the competition all make journalism look like more of a job and less of the joy simple stories and narration of facts gives me. It makes me feel like maybe being a Journalist was a dream offered to me and not actually wanted by me.

Or maybe I really am just lazy enough to fear the thought of hard work in the actual field I say I want to go into, because in reality everyone that knows me understands I work hard at senseless activities for absolutely no reason at all. So how dare my work ethic be questioned on actual work that can impact a community of mindsets.

I was told that journalist tell stories that impact masses, they tell secrets that change lives, they are the people writing for the people, they tell and search for the truth. I wanted to be that. I am that. So why am I so afraid that my stories wont be enough sometimes...

even if they impact just one life, makes one mother smile or brings one family justice, that should be enough ... right?

-Thought