losing purpose

whoops, there it goes

Gray area behind time, 2020, Kibong Rhee

I’m worried I’m losing my ability to write. I have been turning this worry around in my head, feeling its odd knobs and jagged edges; it has been rolling around in me for two years, or maybe more; I can feel it sharpening into a knife.

For a long time I tied my writing to my career in journalism. For many formative years I hinged my life on the romantic idea of a ‘journalist’, one who writes with purpose, who nudges society in the right direction by just telling stories. An alluring identity, but bitterly, bitterly: one out of reach.

I’ve been nursing this hurt for the last four years — been feeling personally betrayed by an industry that has probably chewed up and spat out countless twenty-year-olds, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. All then feeling shame for their naïveté. Knowing I’m not alone doesn’t lessen the hurt; it magnifies it, multiplies it in the feeling of a mother and a father that too hurt impersonally, callously. I can’t stop seeing this kind of personal betrayal echoed and mirrored and echoed and mirrored everywhere.¹

These are the two things I can write about, I think, but in truth it feels like whinging. Apparently the only thing I feel confident doing is complain, and self-pity is ugly. I have a lot of material! I could cry and pout to a friend over a glass of wine: when does it stop; when does the rat race end, when can I feel at home in the world. There are bigger problems in the world and I want nothing but to tend to them, but instead I am sitting here.

I haven’t written publicly for a long time. Not for a lack of trying — a half-written essay about craft sits in my drafts — but really I became a journalist to write. I wanted material that didn’t come from my own life, that didn’t feel like a fuss and a moan and a stomping of the foot. I don’t feel as though I have anything to say. What I did feel I could do was act as a messenger, an intermediary. But here I am again.

The journey I had in the industry feels unwieldy in retrospect: I landed a fun, globe-trotting research job barely out of school (where, thank you pandemic, I]got to trot to just one other place on the globe), only for it to quickly collapse under me and twenty other people with about half a year’s notice; a previously-beloved boss personally stepped in to sabotage my career; then find myself in unstable employment (forever since) in (what I would later learn to be) one of the most toxic newsrooms in the national broadcaster, slogging overnight shifts. And face pushback on following what my conscience was screaming at me to do, trying to insert a modicum of necessary historical context in nightly wraps about the genocidal aftermath of October 7 in Gaza.

Anyone can tell you journalism is not glamorous. You do it for the ‘love of the game’; you’ll be eating shit so many days of the week and paid pennies for it, and you will appreciate it, because you believe in telling stories and believe in ‘speaking truth to power’. Yet: what kind of truth can you speak when your editor won’t even assign you wire copy to produce. What kind of truth can you speak when the overnights editor won’t let you put into the wrap that Israel bombed a hospital. What kind of truth can you speak when you are an ant in the newsroom, and when you finally leave you are asked why, and so you say Gaza, and your feckless middle manager suggests you request a meeting with the editorial standards manager because they ‘might appreciate the feedback’, but you know you are just an ant.

And then to exit that industry and enter the classroom, where dozens of starry-eyed students look at you (I was once you), hungry for hope they might be the ones to tell stories for the nation’s public broadcaster.

The stories I got to work on and put my name to I’m proud of. I was selective. It’s the opposite of what they tell most young journalists: “Write as much as you can. Do as many stories as you can. Get as much experience as possible.” Sometimes the thought floats into my mind that I should have stayed a little longer — should have bided my time, swallowed the growing frustration gotten a couple more years to put on my résumé. But that thought is never accompanied with the feeling of regret.

Everything in my life right now feels like I’m finding my way back to something. I am trying to find a path back to literary studies. I am back in the academy. I am finding a way again to writing and reading and living and breathing words. I feel like I lost my way there for a few years; I’m still finding my way out.

A friend once said to me that I am like a pot of soil — too many things have been planted and pulled out. The soil needs to be still before something new can take root. I find myself at a crossroads, but I must not rush forward. There’s a long way ahead; I must not attract aphids or get root rot.

Anyway, I guess I’m reinventing myself here again; this is what happens. I wanted to be a serious journalist, but it undid me in the way I don’t want to be undone. I changed my mind; this is what happens (no shame in that, nothing I can do about it). What is there to do with myself but to get out of my own head? What is there to do with the time but to write, just a little bit more?²

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1. maybe I feel like this

2. I threw this together up very quickly (but then also sat on it for about 3 weeks). I know it’s not very good — sorry — but it was important to me that I put this out