Everywhere I’m not gonna be

I moved to Northern Indiana from Chicago just under a year ago. I grew up amongst the cornfields, highways and other incredibly interesting scenery of Elkhart, Ind., and now I’ve returned to work for a community newspaper. After four years of undergrad in one of the biggest cities in the world, I am back to living amongst hillbillies with bad oral hygiene.

The working world is so different from college. For instance, if depression or a hangover keeps you from missing a few classes of Ancient Greek Mythology, who cares? You can sit in your slummy apartment, slurp lo mein all day long and still come out of the the course with a decent grade. Here, the newsroom doesn’t care if you need therapy or hate your job or have had a bad day … you must produce, or you will lose your job.

We’re made to feel guilty for taking our sick days and vacation, which really gets to me.
There is always someone walking up to us and telling us all the little things we’ve done wrong.
Health benefits are getting worse and more expensive.
And here, we’re barely supplied with the kind of supplies we need to do our jobs.

It really gets to me, this harsh reality of what it means to be a working adult. Is it just because I’m on the bottom of the totem pole, or will it be this way forever? It’s not fun living paycheck to paycheck and working long hours for no extra money (at this point, I would just settle for a pat on the back).

How easy is it to freelance and get jobs as a free agent? I’ve had about all I can take of cubicles and gray walls. I’m sick of not being everywhere I thought I’d be. I’m sick of not seeing any clear ways to get to those places, either, and it scares the shit out of me.

Journalism vs. Public Relations

I was eight years old when I discovered the typewriter in my dad’s law office. It wasn’t anything special — just a long, tan rectangle that probably weighed more than I did. I had to press down on the “On/Off” switch so firmly I thought it might break, the first time I sat down to write, and it came alive with a steady hum. No matter how old, how deaf, how crazy I might get, I will always remember the noise that typewriter made, the quick clacking of the keys and the “swish” sound that came when I pressed “Enter” to switch to a new line.

I’m not saying my work was, or is, that great; I pecked out stories about trees who spent days dreaming of the things they wanted to be (one was turned into a canoe, another a book and one stayed a tree … I didn’t realize until now the act of being cut down and ground into a boat or book might be a tree’s worst nightmare, but whatever). I created a girl my age who had the life I wanted: Eyes free of wire-rimmed glasses and attention from boys. She, “Libby,” was going to be my first novel. Yeah, I gave up maybe a year later, after several chapters, when I realized that her life wasn’t interesting even to me. Flaws are good.

 But my point is, over the “brrzzzz” of that IBM typewriter, I came to realize I wanted to be a writer. 

A few years later, in middle school, I crafted my own handmade newsletter, [No Subject], and passed it out to my friends. The local newspaper wrote a feature on me. That’s when I began to set my sights on journalism. I was about 14. 

So for almost a decade, I’ve been pursuing a career in print journalism. And I’ve done everything I said I was going to do. I’ve freelanced for a huge paper, interned across the Atlantic and snagged my first reporting job a week after graduating from college. 

I still love reporting. But I get scared because I know jobs are disappearing and I don’t know where that leaves newbies like me. The pay isn’t great, but you do this because you love it and not because you want a lot of money. And besides, half the time chasing a story feels like anything but work. I love telling stories. I’m still that kid pecking away and trying to make sentences mean something, except now I do it on a MacBook. 

The problem, I guess, is that I miss living in a big city. I’m not sure I want to put in the time it would take to take a stab at a major metro reporting job. I don’t want to settle for some crappy “writer/editor” position with some company I don’t care about — these job postings seem ubiquitous in places like Chicago. 

So what if I sold my soul and went into PR? More money, more perks and probably a little more respect. I don’t know what it would take for my heart to be in it. And, when it comes to that nerdy little girl writing about optimistic trees, I don’t want to completely throw her away. When it comes to the things I really care about, I feel like I’ve already thrown away so much. 

I don’t know what I want to do.