Five years feels like too many

A pile of newspapers stacked behind the giant mountain of soda, which will be discussed at a later date.

By Glenn
My five years with my current employer feel like a century, says the 30-year-old who has never worked for another publication.
It feels like forever because it is forever. I’ve covered more and learned more than I ever wanted to. I can’t say any of it’s actually benefitting anyone. It might be good for my 17 readers to stay informed. I took the job assuming I’d be writing about city councils and county boards, filling in with human interest stories whenever I got the opportunity. That’s not how journalism works in 2024, not in a small town.
Instead, I cover everything. I’m at every city council meeting and the days following are spent catching up on the school boards I missed or chasing leads from the meeting I got stonewalled on the night before. If I could do those tasks and only those tasks, I’d be much better rested.
I lose sleep every night. One night, the night before my brief respite from work celebrating my five years, I woke up at 2 a.m. in a panic because of a grievous error I thought I made in a story.
I checked the story. There was no error. It was fine. I didn’t need to wake up at 2 a.m.
I miss drinking less and less as the days go by, but I was once frustrated that my need to do good work forced me to stop. Journalism doesn’t pay enough to support a drinking problem, even if that drinking problem doesn’t cost more than a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I told myself I couldn’t handle the day-to-day stress but discovered once I stopped that a lot of my exhaustion was alcohol-related. Two-day hangovers aren’t fun, nor are the constant aches and pains that come with overconsumption.
Journalism is my social life now. I get paid to go out and talk to people, and my experiences are content. Outside of work, I don’t have experiences. I sit at my computer doing the same thing I do all day at work: I put words on the page. Sometimes, I play video games, but mostly, I’m daydreaming about the novel I’ll never write because I’m terrified I’m some combination of self-conscious and afraid nobody will like it. You’d think I’d be numb to criticism by now, but journalism is different. My heart’s not in my stories the way it is in the writing I do for fun.
Rejecting my journalistic work is a rejection of reality. Rejection of my fiction is a rejection of me, and I’ve always been terrible at handling rejection.
I’m pretty great at rejecting reality, though. That’s why I work for a newspaper in 2024.
As I head into my sixth year working as a reporter, I have career goals. I’ve never had those beyond ‘stay employed,’ I’m sure the career ladder climbers will tell me my new goals aren’t enough either. I don’t care. Achieving them will make me happy.
I want to show I’m a real, functioning person. I want to write and just write. I’m more than just a news reporter. I’m going to write about the sports I watch on TV every night and all day on Sunday and the crappy television shows I fall asleep to. I’ll come up with something funny.
I’ll get words on the page.
Maybe it’ll work. It probably won’t. The goal isn’t about progress, success, or income. It’s about writing something meaningful, even if it’s only meaningful to me.