I’ll probably never forget the Fourth of July last year: I was stuck on a pontoon boat under a bridge in a lightning storm.
My family, best friends and I were soaked and freezing, but we sat huddled together and laughed hysterically.
I think about that day a lot.
After four and a half years, two schools, two majors and four jobs, college looks like a kaleidoscope in my rearview mirror.
It’s a collage of late nights, coffee, writing on deadline, tears, wondering how I was going to pull XYZ off and somehow pulling it off.
College is hard.
College involves a lot of conflict.
But what I saw on the boat that day, and what I’ve come to realize during the last two years of working at the Alligator, is that discomfort and conflict are necessary parts of life.
And if doing journalism has taught me anything, it is to embrace the tension.
During my last two years at UF while I’ve been running around interviewing people and writing headlines and editing things, I’ve come to look at life like one big story.
As one of my favorite authors Donald Miller explained, writing a story and living well share common elements: conflict, tension, confrontation, uncertainty, climax, resolution.
The conflict is certainly real in a newsroom, or at least it is in ours.
A dimly lit office with broken chairs, patchy Wi-Fi and bamboo-matted walls became the setting for a disorganized epic involving dozens of characters that stretched from 5 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night.
The resolution: getting the paper into the racks and into the hands of students. The climax: seeing someone absorbed in the pages at a bus stop.
I traded all my free evenings and down time to be part of that story because although it was hard, it was worth it.
There’s something inspiring about writing and giving it away for free.
We all like resolution.
We like happy endings.
But I think the process along the way that gets us to the ending turns out to be the story after all.
I don’t remember how a lot of things in college resolved: the grades I got on assignments I stressed about, the way financial aid fiascos worked out — stuff that seemed so important at the time.
But I do remember steps along the way.
In my rearview mirror, I see the late nights in Library West when my best friend and I stifled laughs so loudly we risked sounding disrespectful.
I see midnight runs to Redbox in cowboy boots and gym clothes when my roommate and I ditched studying.
I see the night two fellow editors decided to dye my hair red and gave me bangs using paper scissors — and it worked.
I see sweating and cheering at football games.
But like I said, that’s the view from my rearview mirror now.
As I watch graduation approach over my dashboard, I definitely feel the uncertainty.
I can tell it’s probably going to be messy.
But that’s nothing new.
I can’t predict how this next story is going to turn out, but I know the elements for a good story are there.
Conflict is OK, and uncertainty is healthy.
So here’s to good stories, UF: Tell them, and live them.
[Kelcee Griffis is a graduating UF journalism senior and print managing editor of the Alligator. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 4/23/2014 under the headline "Embrace conflict, stories: Managing editor says fond farewell to the Alligator, college"]
