Personal Narrative

Keep digging everyone!  With the museum director's voice echoing in our ears, we quickened our little five-year-old hands trying to unearth dirt-shrouded treasures. Soon, my head popped up with glittering eyes: I found gold. That was the day I became a digger.

But I traded shovels for hours burrowing into coverage from Pulitzer winners and The New York Times binge-scrolls. I spent my free time searching through lede-writing guides and re-reading beautiful journalism, perhaps trying to absorb by osmosis the magic they seemed to emanate.

Yet, all of this excavating was not at a digging site, no I was learning how to dig for stories. Armed with my journalism teacher's encouraging words that "everyone has a story," I used all the searching techniques I knew to find gold.

The first search, like any, was difficult.

Interviewee: a newly crowned Food Network champion returning to teach – and revolutionize – the culinary department. Interviewer: a sophomore, shakily holding a list of printed questions and exuding unpersuasive ‘confidence.’ Yet, when the questions started rolling, I realized that it takes curiosity, and a bit of bravery, to decide to start digging deeper. But with depth comes magic.

The conversation was meant to be a simple profile interview, but a suppressed curiosity surfaced other topics: failure, passion, what it means to come back to a place so long gone. She answered them all: the force that pushes you, a guiding light, some paths come full circle.

Nobody told me when I started that the dig would become my life. Nobody told me that I would readily spend hours interviewing a girl explaining how the school failed her when she was struggling with substance use or writing the story of a family that was failed by the school district when seeking accessibility accommodations for their child. People like to say that it is hard to breathe underground, but the stories, the connection to humanity, quickly became my oxygen.

Soon, I realized that digging was not a solo endeavor. After all, room F087 was filled with fellow diggers: some crowded near a whiteboard diagramming school funding disparities and artists brainstorming front pages for new issues. I learned that we all, tethered by an undying curiosity of what lies beneath our assumptions, worked as a team to uncover. Astonished by the unique tools each individual brought to F087, I began building teams to uncover and publish bigger stories, take on deeper digs.

The gold has been hidden in odd nooks and crannies: sometimes selected from a random number generator or other times from canvassing fraudulent now-bankrupt billionaire’s old neighborhoods. Stories shimmered in nationally-ranking robotics teams devoid of funding and schools preaching inclusivity while perpetuating an environment that was discriminatory. I will never need a museum director to tell me to keep digging again. The stories do it for me, telling me that there is always always more to find, always more to discover.

That is what I love about journalism. Despite being an industry notorious for strict deadlines, I will never finish what I started. Searching is a lifelong journey. But, it is a journey that I love. For me, each story is contributing to a greater life mission: using stories to excavate the layered human experience.

My love for exploring worlds has gotten stuck in my fingernails and stained my hair— this is the type of mark that never leaves. The gold keeps me going, not the nuggets, no, the heads popping up, glittering, feeling of connecting to a story.