Dutiful followers of this blog might recall that earlier this year I’d been experimenting enough with mind-altering substances to have a friend joke that this was looking to be my summer of ‘kind of being high all the time’.
I guess what I was gunning for at the time was some kind of permission slip for expansion of my own after what had felt like months of feeling ‘hemmed-in’ trying to be some socially-acceptable version of ‘good’ that would bring me the stability I have so desperately craved for a very long time. To backtrack further, I’d abruptly been made redundant from a torturously corporate job I’d got after months of job coaching where I’d been directed to reckon with the various self-imposed obstructions that stood in the way of my own success. I was too defensive, this coach said (well, fair enough), too authority-wary (well, sure, that’s not, not true), too ‘arrogant’ when it came to the subject of craft. Hmm. Something true there. Something also not true. Not to bring gender into this, but, well OK, I guess I will (let’s take this scab for a pick, shall we?) would this feedback have so readily been given to a man? I think back to my first year in Hong Kong, as the youngest and least experienced trainee reporter of my cohort, buried in what my editor called ‘soft-heart’ story assignments (thanks to my ‘flowery’ writing style (!!STOP FEMINIZING MY WORK DIPSHITS. IT’S NOT ‘FLOWERY’. IT’S GOOD. ASSHOLES.), and which any self-respecting journalist would call ‘bullshit stories’. My mentor, Joyce, had the not-so-enviable job of figuring out why, if I was as smart and capable as I came across on paper and in conquering those rounds and rounds of interviews, and clearly willing to work around the clock and sacrifice whatever shred of health I had left to get to that city in one piece (I mean I only figured out how to sleep in Hong Kong when I found out you could easily get valium over the counter), my bylines were nowhere near the front page. It was only when she suggested I try being more like the guy reporter who joined a year before I did, with a similar CV and skill set, who was currently enjoying all the trappings of ‘star reporter’ status, that it occurred to me was not that what I lacked was skill. Or talent. Or even penis. No, I really don’t think having such a delicate appendage dangling between my legs would make me better at this at all. What I needed was swagger. Audacity. The confidence to call a bullshit story a bullshit story, and insist on working on the real stuff that mattered. Even or especially if it put me in harm’s way. Now that was a thrill. A female journalist around my age called Kim Wall was murdered on assignment a couple of years later. I didn’t know her, but, as the tributes poured in, I found out that many of my colleagues had, because she’d worked at the paper before I had, gone on to do amazing things elsewhere as an intrepid lady journalist par excellence. Her killer was one of these quirky rich entrepreneur types she was profiling who had built his own submarine and offered to take her on a trip, which she accepted. Some of the comments that came in were the obviously obnoxious: ‘What woman would be dumb enough to follow an ‘oddball’ like that into his private submarine?,’ to which the female journalism community responded, quite rightly: All of us. It had the makings of a great piece, and come on, what are the chances someone that high-profile and seemingly harmless (which I am assuming is how Wall read him, and how I might have read him -- Jimmy Saville got away with what he did because of his ‘hiding-in-plain-sight-quirkiness’) -- acting out their murderous fantasy with a journalist whose paper she moonlights for knows exactly where she is and what she is doing. I don’t know, I hadn’t actually intended to go on this tangent when I opened my laptop, and this is the first time I’m really, thoughtfully trying to put feelings into words about it. At the time, the only thing I felt capable of articulating, to myself, was something along the lines of: “So, curiosity does kill cats. Fuckers.” A curious thing is happening with my hands right now: They’re shaking. What is the thing I tell people who come to me looking for comfort when some kind of injustice has affected them? I say; “We don’t live in a perfect world. All we can do is do what we can to make it that little bit better.” I think just making that promise to at least try helps with that feeling of helplessness. For me, at least. And, certainly it beats living in a tunnel of your own rage. However righteous it might be. Anyway, how did we get here? Well, I was actually going to talk about how my early summer of intoxications has eased into a late summer of extreme sobriety. Going straight-edge, yo. If microdosing was giving me a carte-blanche to be a bit more audacious after the five-month-long stranglehold of corporate hell (pro-tip: everything you heard about journalists is true: our bullshit thresholds are extremely low, so no, we are not going to condone your adding the word ‘amazing’ and a shitty picture of a cupcake and a mawkish exclamation mark to some obfusticating email about holiday allocation that thinly-veils how you’re cheating your employees and don’t actually give a shit about them), sobriety is making it clear that all those qualities that I gave myself permission to have thanks to an amount of a substance so tiny the science-jury is still out on whether it has any affect at all, actually existed within me all along. Case in point, the last job interview I was at, I was, kind of high. You know, just needed a little bit of a pick-me-up to bring out the Don Draper in me. I was asked: How do you feel, pivoting and having to take on a junior role? My response was, well, pretty baller. I leaned back, smiled, and said: “Look at my work, look at my CV. This is what I do. I go somewhere new, I learn what I need to learn, and I make my way through it. Just give me time. I won’t stay junior for very long.” Yeah, so I know I’m a smooth talker, especially under the influence. But the thing is, everything I said was actually true. And it’s still true, whether or not I’m saying with or without a little pick-me-up. The audacity was in me all along, and the work, and the learnings, and all of it. It doesn’t go away just because sometimes people make you feel like it shouldn’t be there. It’s a part of you. That’s the thing about us curious cats. They can kill us, but guess how many lives we’ve got? Fucking tons.
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Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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