Some People Are Born To Be Journalists
After two years of working for the local newspaper, I quit in October. I was good at my job, and in large part I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. But at times I also suffered, mentally and in my personal life, and that’s largely what influenced my decision to leave.
I spent a long time feeling angry and bitter about the more negative things I experienced and the toxicity I saw in the newsroom. I’ve wasted a lot of energy feeling incensed about the way the paper seems to burn through reporters, myself included. I spent a lot of time crying while I worked there, my stomach twisted into an anxious knot, and I know I’m not the only one.
Some of this may sound familiar to those of you who’ve read my work before. If you’re revisiting my profile, you might have noticed there have been a few changes, including that of my name. Make no mistake, “Corinna” is the name I was given at birth, and I don’t want to write under a pen name anymore.
If you’re new, you may notice that I haven’t published a story here since November 2020. That’s not true. I spent a few hours today completing something of a profile overhaul, including deleting a lot of my recent work. I guess I’m looking for something of a fresh start, even though I know nothing on the internet ever entirely goes away.
I’m not going to rehash everything that I’ve thought or had strong feelings about in the months since I quit. I had coffee recently with Raven, a reporter I hired and mentored, and I have no trouble believing that she is now more or less in the position I was with the editor, and she described a tiny bit of their relationship now — it certainly sounds like she’s become more comfortable speaking up with him, and good for her — and it gave me the perspective I don’t think I had in the time I spent dwelling in negativity.
My working relationship with my editor is one of the things I miss. Visiting with the publisher is another. No matter how I might have let it get overshadowed by my own bitter pettiness, the truth is that I’m grateful for every chance they gave me and all that they taught me. I wish them well, and I still read the paper — the product of their hard work and leadership — every day. (Or at least skim the headlines.)
Jenni Gritters summed it up well: “I’m not a journalist in my heart or soul at all. I’m a writer, a storyteller, a person who is skilled at working hard and fast.”
Amidst being a writer, I’ve tried my hand — or keyboard, rather — at blogging multiple times over multiple years, and a most recent venture was on Wordpress, which I also overhauled today by completely shutting down. I hadn’t gotten very far into it, so I hadn’t that much to lose.
What I did lose, I think, is sight of what I really want, which is not even to blog. Some days it is, and particularly when I spend a little too much time browsing kimberlywilson.com, part of me would like to have her life, with its focus on tranquility and Parisian flair and her beautiful pink and black website. But ultimately, what I want is to be a novelist, and while I’ve written an incomplete novel and have more ideas I’d like to explore, I think blogging has served as little more lately than a distraction.
Wordpress, too, served as a distraction to the distractions, I think, because I guess I wanted something with more customization than Medium offers — only to ultimately get caught up in customizing, and spending money I didn’t need to spend on features I don’t really need, at the expense of writing in general.
No more.
Truthfully, I’m happy to be back here and I have some blog ideas I’d like to work on, too. But I’d like to see myself spend less time online and a little more time buried deep inside the worlds inside my head, letting the details flow through my fingers to land on a digital page. I don’t know how that’s going to go, but that’s the truth and it’s up to me whether or not I hold myself accountable to it.
I was not born to be a journalist, and I may as well go on the record now stating that I was probably not born to be a personal trainer either, though that’s what’s up next for me. More on that another day.
What I was born to be is a writer, because I’ve been writing in one form or another for my entire life.
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
