WHEN I was young - say, about 10 years old - I wrote in a journal. At 12, I started another, and at 14, there was yet another.
These diary entries consisted of - among other topics - adolescent ramblings about why I was angry that day, of in-like letters to a boy in the school hallway, of quoted lines from Lord Byron and ee cummings. Somewhere between these scribbles, I decided I was a writer, the kind of girl who relied on words and language as if each individual letter were capable of holding the warmth of hot chocolate.
A year-and-a-half ago, at age 20, I decided I was not a writer. When I wrote, I did so as a sort of cleansing ritual for my internal struggles. With the exception of a handful of newspaper articles, I never did so for the public eye. How could I call myself a writer?
This revelation occurred about six months before I became The Cavalier Daily's managing editor.
When I applied for internships and jobs last summer, the question couldn't help itself: If I didn't want to become the next Lane DeGregory or Dan Barry, then what the hell was I doing? Why spend 60 hours a week in a fluorescent-lit basement only to do poorly in school and never sleep? When the "con" column has about 20 more bullet points than the "pro" side, why go forward?
Sometimes the answer was that I became involved at the newspaper when I was a first-year student attempting to act like I belonged in college and simply never left. Sometimes it was that I knew I would never again have the opportunity to lead more than 150 of my peers as we attempted to do something productive for the community. What any rational human being can discern from this ambivalence is that upon accepting the position, I had no reason - the real, good, emotional gut-check kind - for doing so. And sometimes I said that.
It was easier to play this off than one might imagine - a laugh, a joke about never backing down from a challenge, a shoulder shrug. In any case, I have never known an interviewer to question too thoroughly why an individual chose to take on responsibility.
What I should have said - but could not have said at the time - was that there is something intangible about The Cavalier Daily that makes it difficult for anyone, even no-longer-writers, to walk away. I can say that now, having spent a month away from the office after two years of wading through countless articles. Now that someone else is sitting at what used to be my desk, it is far easier to accept that the organization provides a sense of stability and significance to each of the lives that walks through its doors.
It seems cheap to chalk it up to the unexplainable, too reminiscent of poorly written science fiction. But when I drafted my bullet-pointed pro-con list for whether I should run for managing editor, I began to bend the rules. Some items on the "pro" side were worth two items on the opposing side. Some were worth five. Some
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