I always take a deep breath when people ask why I do what I do. It’s a long story.
Once I got over the childhood wants-to-be-everything-from-an-astronaut-to-a-ballerina phase, I wanted to be a writer. I typed pages and pages of attempted first novels on my mother’s faulty typewriter.
I shifted goals from becoming the next great American novelist to something with a more stable paycheck: a journalist — joke’s on 15-year-old me.
So I stopped staring at a blinking cursor in the middle of another prologue draft and started fumbling my way through what news really is. I eventually realized I preferred to work with the rough drafts as a copy editor than to write my own, but I was determined to stay in this world.
But there was no one moment when I thought, “I am where I want to be. I made the right choice.”
It definitely wasn’t my first walk into the Alligator office for open house freshman year, which almost scared me away. But that initial fear transformed into seven semesters of my making this office my home.
No, I don’t remember the first time I knew — it’s been more like a three-year realization that came on slowly and quickly at the same time.
It’s in the small things:
I feel it when you find the perfect word to make that headline fit in an impossible amount of space.
I feel it when you spell a word correctly without the red, squiggly line telling you just how wrong you are.
I feel it when I see someone pulling a paper out of the racks.
And it’s the big things:
I feel it when everyone is working collectively on something “shockingly” few people will find important, but everyone feels a weight on their shoulders regardless of how small a role we play.
I feel it when the time of night and the number of hours we haven’t slept just don’t matter until the story itself stops us in our tracks.
I feel it when I recognize someone else feeling it for the first time. It’s in the wide eyes seeing what we do, and it’s in the enthusiasm in something they didn’t know was amazing until that moment.
So yes, I love what I do.
I will always believe what I do is important. This field won’t go away; it will only evolve to fit the times like every other field does.
There will be a million things I would change, but I won’t regret this.
I will have my moments when I know I made what everyone else will call a mistake. I’ll joke and ask, “Why didn’t I become a doctor or an accountant like all the other people?” It will probably even come sooner than I think, when I read rejection letters in the coming weeks or when I struggle to pay rent in New York City in the coming months. That’s the life I chose when I rejected something practical for something I wanted.
But what my years here at the Alligator have taught me is we’re all on this sinking ship together, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Kristan Wiggins is a graduating UF journalism senior. She is the managing print editor at the Alligator and previously served as editor-in-chief, managing online editor and copy desk chief.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 4/22/2015]
