wayfarer, there is no way, you make the way by walking.
The irony is not lost on me that my professional writing career began through blogging when I was 13 and first became “Tumblr famous” and now, well, here I am once again back to blogging 17 years later. You used to be able to pickaxe your way into writing for a publication like a Final Girl at the end of a horror movie fulfilling her destiny of escaping, finding your desired destination because you had a Tweet go viral, or because someone who had a connection was willing to introduce you to an editor at a party. I know because that’s how I made it in at the beginning, and because I have used my resources and connections to enthusiastically bring many other people into publications over the last decade.
I’m beside myself that at this point, that just no longer feels possible. The proverbial well is seemingly dry. In the middle of an already long and storied professional life as a journalist and writer, media is collapsing.
If you’d told me as a teen—wading through poverty and scrounging together essay contest money just to buy myself food in high school in 2009—that my long nights with my laptop open on my futon on the floor of my bedroom, walls covered in cork boards full of Richard Siken quotes and Doctor Who posters and doodles and notes my friends and I passed each other in advanced Spanish and AP lit, that I’d end up here, I would have believed you. Albeit with some healthy skepticism. You know, the kind anyone who has survived the horrors is bound to have acquired. If you had told me, or moreover if Now Me told Past Me, that all my poring over journalistic articles and as many books about sociopolitical world happenings and personal essays and poems as I could get my hands on would lead to the career I’ve had so far, and the moment we’re in at present, I would have deer in the headlights’ed you and simply nodded.
Let’s fast forward to now, in my adult apartment in Brooklyn, many miles away from where I learned to be a journalist and writer while working as editor-in-chief of my award winning high school newspaper. My walls? They are still covered in Richard Siken quotes. The Doctor Who posters are framed this time around. And the doodles have become my friends’ professional art that they get paid real money for. I’m still scrounging together ramen money from odd jobs. My writing has been read by millions more people than I ever expected and certainly more than I am comfortable with. Things are extremely different. Things are extremely similar. I am 30 going on 13. Time truly is a flat circle, huh? Welcome to my new blog/newsletter, appropriately named for one of my favorite lyrics from Eve 6's iconic song Inside Out.
Like many other people in the media industry, I have experienced constant layoffs and found that my career and my financial and often mental and emotional stability were merely expected casualties. I was first affected by it about eight or nine years ago and continued to find myself without dedicated places to write and report. I jumped from Teen Vogue to (honestly I can’t remember where now) to Refinery29, back to Teen Vogue, to Bitch Media, back to Refinery29, to Teen Vogue, to working marketing jobs where I was stifled creatively just to pay the bills, and then marketing jobs that paid more than the bills but threatened to undo me completely. I watched my friends and colleagues I admired, too, jump from place to place trying to find a modicum of stability. I have watched many of them leave media altogether. Not because they don’t love it enough, but because staying can feel like a fool’s errand.
Fortunately for me, the fool is one of my favorite tarot cards—and I relish an opportunity to falter around a path that is rough and unfinished and find out how to build the way forward.
One of my favorite lines ever is from a poem by Antonio Machado: “Caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más; Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” Translated from Spanish, it is roughly: “Wayfarer, the only way is your footsteps, there is no other. Wayfarer, there is no way, you make the way by walking.” I have repeated this to myself for half my life. It keeps me going.
Last weekend, in between 12-hour hospital shifts caring for a loved one, job interviews, and work, I sobbed my eyes out at a play I went to see so I could write about it for a publication. When I first got in touch with press about the play a mere month ago, the plan had been to write about it for an outlet that’s now dead. Tale as old as time in media. This is certainly not the first time I’ve been in the middle of writing a large story that’s deeply, personally important to me, only to find that the piece now has no home, I have no kill fee, and I must now scramble to find another way to get the story out there. In fact, it’s perhaps the twentieth time in the last few years. Huge bummer is an understatement.
That said, my first response was not to give up but to dig around to find the next best values-and-vibes-aligned outlet to write about it.
In texting and calling half of the most brilliant and talented writers and editors I am friends with in media, a very sour truth overtook me: nearly all the outlets to write niche, queer-informed, more radical and weird pieces are just… gone. Or they’re not taking pitches. Or if they are, their budgets are knee-capped. So I should, once again, come back in a few months and try my luck then. Or worse, I’m not going to get an email back at all. Not just me. None of my friends are. And we have stories to tell. Really important ones. Necessary ones. Some of them are Black women. Some of them are immigrants. Many of them are multiply disabled. Or come from poverty. Many of them are queer. And/or trans. We all started out in a media landscape where none of us held the reigns or had a say in telling our own stories and the stories of our communities who have deeply deserved the microphone passed to them. And through love and perseverance, we transformed everything. We said we actually won’t take no for an answer. We became the columnists and writers and journalists and vertical editors. We made sure people listened to and learned from people who most needed to be heard. We built support networks and mentorship programs and had late night group chats where we plotted to make media more accessible and representative. We made a difference.
Early-20’s me was thrilled to have made my way into the media club, despite entering it in ways that deeply traumatized me (if you know, you know, but I won't make space for that here. Google my name if you must). But they thought that no matter how much institutions suck and how true it is that cash rules everything around me, there would always be places to tell the stories that matter most to marginalized and systemically harmed people, where we could be paid to change the conversations and give others hope. I hate to say I have mostly been proved wrong. I admire my somewhat youthful naivety, and my absolute childlike wonder and groundedness in hope. I don’t say that sarcastically or passive aggressively, truly. It is by and far the reason I am still alive and still putting pen to paper every day of my life, whether those words are being published somewhere or merely shared with loved ones privately.
I am so proverb and poetry-pilled that while on the phone with one of the good friends in media who I had called to seek advice and suggestions from, they told me they were scared of things like cold calls and air fryers because of uncertainty. Is the phone call going to be one that carries bad news? Is the air fryer that you cannot see inside of going to explode? And my response, was, in essence: Well yeah I mean you don’t know what’s going to happen, of course, but isn’t that kind of a control issue? Like even if you could know what the phone call is about or see inside the air fryer like you can see inside the oven, anything can happen at any time. The idea that it would be easier to handle something just because you have more information is an illusion. Life requires that we take the first step in the dark. And then I apologized to them for being a fucking nerd who turns everything into a philosophical hypothesis. They laughed and agreed, they do want to get more comfortable with sitting in discomfort so they can handle cold calls and using an air fryer.
I say all this to say we can still make a difference. We built something that the old guard has continued to try to destroy, not because it doesn’t matter or isn’t possible, but because we were so successful they have been rightfully threatened by us. And you know what? They deserve to stay scared. I am still seeing many people give up and leave media altogether—accept that we’ve been “culled.” But I am also seeing people like me who refuse to give up on ourselves and each other and the stories we deserve to tell.
So I’m not going anywhere. At least not yet. I’m weary and worn down and stubborn as fuck. I’m mad and I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m going to use the skills and knowledge and resources I have to build and offer resources to collectives of people who deserve to be speak: people who deserve more than microphones—people who deserve megaphones. I’m going to figure out what it might look like to build the storytelling platforms and spaces we need and want. I don’t know quite what that’s going to look like yet but I do know that one of my favorite movies from childhood taught me “if you build it, they will come.” And I have found that to be true.
After the last two years of barely making ends meet and taking whatever work I could and only occasionally getting to do the journalism and writing I love, the last few weeks have pushed me through a portal. I have to take the first step in the dark. I cannot keep repeating the same cycles and patterns I have been for years, in many ways, not just professionally. I know I deserve better. I know I can do better. It’s time to be as disciplined as freelancing has taught me I can be.
I won’t lean on the corny and often overused adage of “they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” though it would be appropriate for me. I will lean into my love of Stephen Sondheim’s work and say that you cannot suck dry the waters of the sea when we are all made of 70% water and will come back to overpower you, this time a wave.
I don't know exactly what this is going to be yet, but I know I have to stop making excuses for why I'm not publishing my writing just because I'm not getting paid to do it. It’s time to do things I have been wanting to try since I was a teenager but have found one reason or another to avoid, because I was scared. There is a reason I have a Courage the Cowardly Dog tattoo on my arm that tells me to DO IT SCARED. The time will pass anyway. What am I going to do about it? I cannot disappoint that cute pink little canine, or my teenage self who believed in me. I won’t.
