I remember the day I fell in love. Standing on tiptoe to look at the pages of the Complete Webster’s Dictionary, at 5 years old I knew I was in, and I was in deep.
I had fallen in love with words, all words. I was enamored by their weight, the feel of them ““ I was intoxicated by what they could do. Their hold over me never loosened.
So when I came to UCLA, it was no big surprise that finding the Daily Bruin was a lot like stumbling across my girlhood crush and finding him all grown up and handsome.
It’s been demanding, though, this courtship with the written word. Not at all the way I’d imagined it.
Sources don’t call back. Writer’s block at deadline is agonizing. Finding the objective truth is damn near impossible. If journalism is about recording experiences, we, as writers and editors, have the burden of getting it right. We spend hours cursing at computers and on more than one occasion I’ve wondered if I remember what daylight looks like.
I’ve been tempted so many times to walk away, but I never have. You don’t walk away from what you truly love.
Because when other things went south, when relationships dissolved and I seemed to lose my way, when my well-constructed plans for the future came crashing down and I wasn’t quite sure where I fit anymore, there was always one place to go where I still felt the wonder of what words can do. There was always a way to find my way back here.
Because even on the longest, darkest production days, I’ve never lost sight of the power our words have to challenge discourse, to open eyes and to motivate activism. I am, in the end, still filled with the same wonder I was so many years ago staring into a dictionary.
But now, as graduation looms, it seems my relationship with this newspaper will come to its inevitable end. Finishing school and moving hundreds of miles away, I’ve come to accept that it won’t work out long distance. The truth is, I’m afraid for the heartbreak of letting this relationship go. I suppose in my future there will be others, but never like this ““ never like the wonder of my first love.
Srimushnam was a News writer from 2005 to 2007 and assistant News editor in 2008.