I couldn’t find it anywhere.
It’s strange, because as an investigative reporter I’ve been trained to find things — both documents and people — for information I need.
But I couldn’t find it. That one thing that would show me how much I’ve changed — from the person I was when I first came into the newsroom three years ago to the person I am now.
I’m leaving The Daily Utah Chronicle, and the truth is, I can’t remember who I used to be.
I really can’t.
So, in the last couple of days, I’ve dug for evidence of personal change.
I’ve been searching through e-mails, like one I received from Jeremiah, a homeless man I wrote about, who confessed that the reason he got arrested for trespassing was for taking a chicken sandwich from a professor’s office. He said he hadn’t eaten in days.
I’ve been browsing through the archives to help me relive moments, like the time I had to write about a group on campus holding a 24-hour prayer. I was in a bad mood that day, and I flat-out didn’t want to write it.
The shooting at Trolley Square happened that same night. It still blows my mind how pictures of chaos, paramedics and a dead woman appeared side-by-side with my story about students offering prayers.
I’ll never forget that, and it wasn’t the only time something like that has happened.
I have a box of mementos related to experiences like that, with things such as ribbons handed out during a Virginia Tech memorial in the Union, T-shirts we made saying “Team News” for our yearly football game against ASUU and a birthday candle where the wish I blew out was that an immigration bill that would have taken my roommate’s ability to pay in-state tuition would not pass. (It didn’t.)
Other clues to who I used to be didn’t surface through physical things, but through conversations with people with whom I’ve worked here in Union Room 236 day in and day out.
With coworkers, I counted the times people have threatened to sue me, times I’ve threatened to quit and how one time I attempted to interview a ghost.
Those events have changed me for the better to the point where I can’t remember who I used to be. For example, for the first time, I told people about when, alone in the newsroom, I got down on my knees before submitting a story and outright prayed that I got everything right.
And I would like to thank the people who answered those prayers by giving me the knowledge I needed to become a professional journalist.
Thank you to Jim Fisher and Glen Feighery for believing in me.
Thank you to my friends at The Chronicle for inspiring me, to my family for supporting me and to my roommates for putting up with me.
Thank you to the U Police Department for addicting me to crime reporting.
And finally, thank you to my mentors for their continuing guidance: Matt Canham, Danyelle White and Sheena McFarland.
It’s strange to know that I’m not going to be here anymore, sitting at the desk, in the same office where I’ve lived for the last three years.
It’s funny to think although I won’t be here, the people I’ve written about in articles are still out there, working and living with the same passion I once tried to match in words.
The articles I’ve written will still be out there, too, in some form or another. I mean, how many people are lucky enough to have a job that allows them to record the people, events and exact moments that have changed them?
It’s in our words that we remember who we are, and it’s in mine where I found who I was. In a way, journalists write history as it happens, but on a deeper level I, along with many writers, keep writing so we never forget our own.
