Tags

PHOTO BY DONNA MARIE SEVILLA A cup of tea to relax the mind before the words could flow to paper.

PHOTO BY DONNA MARIE SEVILLA
A cup of tea to relax the mind before the words could flow to paper.

I’ve had this unusual habit as of late to start doing things last minutes. Assignments don’t get typed until an hour before class, or during class to hand in by the end of class. Well, if there’s one thing I’ve procrastinated the most, it’s my response to the question “Why Journalism?” In all honesty, I could never think of a proper response as to “Why journalism?” because I never really had a reason. I knew I didn’t like for nursing and wanted to do something that was simply not that.

My online web writing and design professor asked our class to write a blog post about why journalism and what had led to us being at Humber. Now, to understand the lateness of this response, this was as far back as mid-September, early October. But that’s beside the point.

At the beginning of my third semester in this program, I decided to get a locker to put all my stuff in, especially knowing that my classes would be more hands-on with the cameras this year. Yet in the times I didn’t put anything but my backpack and lunch bag, there were no seats in the entire school. People were sleeping on sofas. Cafeterias were crowded. My locker had become my little cubby to sit in during my lunch breaks, especially that four-hour break every Tuesday. (Trust me, don’t ever sit in a locker for four hours and it doesn’t matter if you fit or not.)

People stared and some took Instagram photos and videos. One of my peers also had a locker down the hall but she was in the top locker, gaining attention that basically caused an uproar.

The intention of it wasn’t for attention itself. It was convenience for me.

Yet, my other peers would approach me and they would ask what I’m doing by sitting in a locker. Some joked about decorating it into a little house, while professors commented on my use of the space as I worked away on my laptop. I think the most common question I received while sitting in there was, “Why are you sitting in a locker?”

I said, “Why not?”

I never realized my response to that question would be what I feel about journalism right now. Why not journalism? The world is full of possibilities. I didn’t want to be a nurse for the reason it gave me bad memories and it wasn’t something I could handle. But why not journalism? I bet you all of my classmates could tell you this and that, and so could I – like how our professor says all the professors gather together to determine who was doing well in the program and so on – and that would only be a set of excuses for you to not do it.

Those excuses are obstacles, like every assignment you run into.

Think of yourself as a runner with an obstacle of hurdles to jump over before you can reach the finish line. Each hurdle is an excuse to not jump over and continue on your path. Each hurdle will make you hesitate and sometimes you may try to walk it, go under it or around it. Avoid it and you might get docked points in the race, much like how you lose the experience that you could’ve learned in jumping that hurdle.

If you can stop giving yourself excuses and just do it, then you can do it.  There’s no easy route to everything in life. There will always be obstacles, a mere result of how you dislike your inability to do something. To take a chance. Consider it a leap of faith. Next thing you know, you’ll be jumping hurdles like it’s no problem.

When you finally cross that finish line, you’ll look back at the race you just did. Someone will ask you, “Why did you jump over the hurdle and not go around it?” You’ll say, “If I don’t jump, I won’t learn from it. If I go around, I’ll be dodging the lesson I could’ve benefitted from.” And soon they’ll ask you, “Why did you do this race?”

Well…

Why not?