Personal Narrative
The door to Room 151 opens into a small hallway where awards are lined on both sides. On the right is a little kitchen with two mini fridges that smell like gas station taquitos, grocery store sushi and instant ramen. When you turn left around the corner, you'll see swaths of Christmas lights, yearbook spreads pinned to cork boards, half-used reporter's notebooks and a door — the one to our "back room."
That’s where designers work quickly on big, fancy Apple computers on deadline nights and where writers curl up in gaming chairs when they need a quiet space to transcribe interviews. It’s also where spontaneous dance parties and truth circles take place when worknights run too late for comfort.
The backroom is where I remember sitting this past Halloween with tears streaming down my face. I’d just read a 20-something year old printed-out version of an article from the Washington Post. It’s from the perspective of a mother with cancer who’s getting her young daughter ready for Halloween. And as she does this, she’s thinking about all the things she’ll one day miss: her prom, wedding, children and more. And for a brief moment, she gets to indulge the fantasy as they play with glitter and tutus and unicorn horns.
It was around 5 p.m. that Friday when I finished and realized I was alone in the back room. I was finally able to take a breath. But my chest kept heaving, and I started doing the awkward silent cry that you see at funerals.
It was hard to stop.
But it was the moment I realized what all of this was for. It wasn’t the conventions or deadlines parties or distribution.
It was something bigger.
***
What I love about journalism is how, on a given day, I can learn about breathing techniques, dead geckos and post-show theater traditions, or the rising rates of gun violence among adolescents, eating disorders, grief and teen pregnancy.
I’ve listened to one girl on the wrestling team talk about how she walked into the bathroom at a regional tournament and watched another girl’s coach cut chunks of her hair off with safety scissors before weigh-ins.
I interviewed a student in the park by his house. He recounted his experience immigrating from Honduras where he watched people get shot and killed on street corners daily. He wondered when it would be him.
I walked into the bedroom of rising senior Will Ensley who had died just a few weeks earlier in a nine-car pile-up. His parents silently showed me his medals and magazines and his grandfather's watch that he always wore to school dances sitting on his nightstand.
Those moments felt frozen in time. Like the outside world couldn’t leak in, and I was being let in on one big secret. Sometimes those conversations made me cry. But for the most part, I kept writing, reporting and talking about it all in my adviser’s office.
I like to believe that I’m always thinking and operating like a reporter.
I’m quiet in class as I listen to table conversations near me; a sophomore in health talking about her two-year-old daughter’s birthday party, girls on the gymnastics team lamenting in weights class about this being their last season before it is no longer a KSHSAA sport, or one talkative senior in creative writing who presents about the tattoo on her ribs that commemorates her mother who died of cancer.
I didn’t think anything is more important than listening to someone's story. That was until I got the opportunity to actually tell it.
The journalism room was always a safe space. It’s where I used to eat lunch every day — until the administration made a rule against it. It’s where I go after school to talk with my friends, and watch over my adviser's shoulder as he edits, or just sit and listen in on quiet conversations and interviews.
I can’t imagine what my life would be like without journalism. When I’m bored, I scroll through the New York Times and AP News articles. I stalk the news websites of other high schools. I look through the NSPA award archives.
In the car, my fingers flit to Google Docs instead of Snapchat or Instagram, and I read through revisions made by writers, contemplating headlines and ledes.
As my passion for journalism soars, so does my stress — in the eye-twitching way.
My moments of clarity are in those conversations.
It’s those conversations that have filled me with the realization of what can and cannot be controlled.
The Ensley’s could not do anything to stop that dump truck from hitting the back of their son’s white pick-up.
Courtney Allison could not control whether her cancer came back.
Administrators at Shawnee Mission East High School could have decided not to suspend the girl whose nose was broken by a male student who physically and verbally assaulted her.
Kansas legislators could allocate more money to fund special education instead of using it on tax breaks.
As journalists, our job isn’t to advocate or solve problems or make sense of everything, only present people with realities, and make them think.
Sometimes every task, every deadline and interview hits at once, and it feels like an immense, immovable weight.
But, most of the time, taking photos, or gaining people's trust as they tell me something they haven’t told anyone before, or collaborating with other staffers on a front cover, is freeing.
I can’t think of a more rewarding experience than getting to be on Northwest Passage. I am eternally grateful for these past four years and for my staff for listening to me awkwardly start class. I am indebted to my adviser for watching me try to delete and rewrite 1,600-word drafts on deadline night and slowly go insane.
There’s not a moment in my high school journalism experience that I’d trade. I have no hesitation when asked what I’ll do after graduation: journalism. Whether that’s reporting on small feel-good features for local outlets or writing investigative pieces for big-time news organizations, I’ll be there.
I hope that 20-something years from now, someone else will be sitting in their version of the backroom, alone, reading something I wrote. And I hope they learn something and feel moved by it.
Because if there’s anything I’ve learned in these past four years, it’s that stories are forever.
