If I get stressed out enough, the stress goes away.
If something is too anxiety-inducing for me to handle, I’m suddenly a neurotypical. It’s a superpower I can’t control, but it also means I’ve become addicted to the adrenaline rush of putting myself in high-stress, chaotic situations just to perform better under pressure than I do in a calming environment.
Journalism is a profession in which one is always under some type of pressure. For one, I’ve been diagnosed with extreme social anxiety to the point where I find it incredibly difficult to do a task as simple as approaching someone at a party. However, if you told me I was writing a profile on this imaginary person at a party and my deadline was in two days, I would suddenly be perfectly calm and prepared to sit down with them, skip the small talk, and begin asking them probing questions. Because I’m not me at that moment, I’m a journalist. And that’s what journalists do. Put my personal life at stake and I would much rather lay in bed all day, watching Gilmore Girls and eating Golden Oreos until my teeth hurt.
Give me a professional incentive, something that could help me gain more experience in the career field I plan to go into, and I’m immediately doing everything I can to get the assignment done. Call it imposter syndrome, workaholism, whatever. No matter the label, it’s how I operate. And to be completely transparent, I’d rather it not be.
The reality of just how clear the divide between my typical personality and my “journalism” personality became much more prevalent when someone else witnessed the “switch.”
This semester, the second semester of my freshman year, is the first semester that I have a college journalism class. First semester I studied abroad and took general humanities classes, so being thrown into the scene of college journalism was a jarring transition after three months of rest and relaxation with fairly easy classes. I forgot what it was like to be a reporter – to be searching for a story everywhere I go – but with one of my first reporting assignments I quickly fell back into my old reporting habits. The assignment was to find six compelling photo opportunities around the Northeastern Campus and other areas through Boston. Two photos had to be “newsworthy,” two had to relate to Northeastern, and two had to be “historical Boston” related. We had about a week to get it done. So I set out to find interesting photojournalism after being out of practice for half a year.
The first shots I got were the “historical Boston” shots, which were easy enough and I had some fun exploring Boston with a friend. This was also significantly before the deadline. More than anything, those photos acted as a lesson in photo composition rather than journalism. A worthwhile exercise regardless.
I let a few days pass by, and the deadline grew closer. This is something that is a constant struggle for me. I am almost never able to be productive without some form of pressure weighing down on me. Usually, there is the threat of constant deadlines, but school hasn’t picked up quite that much yet and I am still struggling to be productive with so much down time. Eventually came the day before the assignment was due. I still had four more photos to take and very little time to take them. Around this time was when I felt the familiar “switch” that I used to feel but hadn’t experienced in over half a year. It was time to get. Shit. Done.
That morning, I headed to the Stetson East Dining Hall on Northeastern’s campus and decided to start looking for a story there. I scanned the students sitting at the tables scarfing down breakfast in their black puffer jackets, waiting for their 8 a.m. classes. Not many people were willing to talk to me (despite my best efforts) so I snapped some pictures of students getting some studying done and a shot of the outside of Stetson East then headed to my first class.
After classes, I still hadn’t found my last two photos: the newsworthy section.
Thankfully, by some kind of wonderful miracle, it started snowing suddenly and profusely. Meaning I had my news. I just had to go out and find something interesting enough to capture. So I went walking around campus, and I happened to stumble across my boyfriend, who came and got lunch with me and then joined me on my quest for some form of newsworthy to capture on my phone’s camera. After a while of walking, I saw the bright, organic shapes of Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao’s “Lumpy Notes” sculptures surrounded by around five snow shovelers in bright yellow suits. . On the way over, I told my boyfriend about how I was nervous about the amount of work I had to get done in the next week, and he comforted me, telling me everything would be alright. Immediately, we reached the landing with the sculptures and I left his side.
“Hey guys! Are you working on clearing the snow?” I asked the group of workers, the rest of the world disappearing. I wanted to get some information on these men’s jobs. I ended up talking to them for around seven or so minutes, asking them a large volume of questions and chatting them up all while capturing as many pictures as I could and looking for the right compositions.
What could I use as a frame? Maybe the sculptures? “How often do you guys do this type of work around campus? How long does it usually take you?” Oh, those staircases would make nice leading lines. I observed, got some pictures, and had an enlightening conversation. They finished up their work, and I walked away satisfied with my information and photo gathering.
“What the fuck…?” I heard my boyfriend say as I caught up with him to walk back to our dorm building.
“What?” I asked, puzzled.
“I’ve just never seen you like that”
“Like what?”
“Working like that… It's just very interesting. Usually you’re kinda… how do I say this?” he contemplated for a moment before deciding on, “slightly, uh, socially awkward? I didn’t see a spark of that while you were talking to those workers. It’s like it all just disappeared.”
I knew this to be true, I definitely felt the way my anxiety– social or otherwise– subsided when I was doing journalistic work, but I wasn’t aware that it was so obvious to other people.
In some ways, this is a good thing. It shows that I love the field of work that I’m going into to the point that I’m able to set aside my own insecurities to get that work done. In other ways, it’s a vice, because I know that I won’t get to the point that I can set aside those insecurities until they become too much for me to handle. It’s a topic I’ve been grappling with since I started doing journalistic work, and I suspect it’s something I will continue to struggle with as I move forward in my journalistic journey. It was a small assignment, and I don’t think I excelled at it by any means. My photos were rather mundane and the interviews I collected were more simple than complex pieces of reporting, but it reminded me of what it felt like to be a journalist. Now, it’s up to me to decide whether I like that feeling. Whether I want to be tied to that intense apprehension for the rest of my life, or if I want to make a change. More than anything, this assignment has made me contemplate the approach I take to my own work and how it differs from my personal life. I’d love to be someone that’s socially and professionally balanced at the end of the day, but instead, I’m socially awkward and occasionally professionally adept. And let’s be honest, how sustainable can that lifestyle really be?