Feet First

It is currently my third week of school and yeah..... the stress has started. In just a few days the amount of work that needs to be done has increased...like by a lot. Suddenly this thing called" deadlines" keeps popping up on my planner. This semester I was accepted into a journalism internship for my school paper. Journalism is a career that I've kind of always had in the back of my mind and I figured that the internship would give me the opportunity to experience what it would be like. I also figured that I could learn some other skills like how to podcast and better my skills and others such as photography. Entering this internship, I had grand ideas about what I would be able to accomplish and how I was going to write these amazing stories. Now let me be clear, I know that I still can accomplish those goals but this first week of the internship has been one long Masterclass titled " This is way harder than you thought it would be, isn't it ?" There is a lot that goes into journalism that I hadn't previously thought about such as dealing with the timing of sources, having to get on-campus earlier than I wanted, or leaving campus later than I would've preferred. Often I will have an idea in mind for an article only to spend a good amount of time thinking of a good opener. There is also the stress of fearing that my writing will be bad and disliked by others. Or maybe the people I'd interviewed will read the article and be disappointed in its quality. This stress added on top of just regular academic stress has been bothering me. However, this newspaper internship-even if I never worked in journalism will have been a blessing.

The fact that it's an internship that I won through the process of asking professors to write letters of recommendation for me and the fact that it's a course that I'm getting credit for basically stop me from dropping it. But even if those conditions weren't in place, I still wouldn't drop it because I've realized just how important it is on a more holistic level. For one, this class is the only one in my schedule where the content isn't something I am either familiar with or fairly good at. It's the only one where I ask for help. To put it simply, it's the only class I have that makes me uncomfortable. And I thank God for that.

Since the past week, I've been forced to put my work rate into higher gear due to the nature of having to work in completely new territory. I've been slowly but surely embracing the stressful nature of the work. I've seen myself get better at asking questions during my interviews and getting better at listening to the interviewee. The skills are coming along, more at an Eeyore pace than Tigger but it's getting there. The stress of learning something new probably won't ever go away for me, but it's no problem. I'll be jumping in feet first.