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Last Thursday while attending the Iowa Newspaper Association Awards, I received my first two awards as a professional journalist. The first was for Best News Feature Story and the other for Best Breaking News Photo.
If you’d like to check those out, the news feature story is titled “Watching the ebb and flow,” ("Retired postman reflects on career" for the online version) and covers the retirement of Mark Evans after 33 years as one of Creston’s mail carriers. The photo was included in Tuesday’s article recapping the INAs.
Obviously, I’m proud. Early last year, I wrote about how I was worried I wouldn’t find my place in this grand world of writing, and now that I’m over the curve of this milestone, I can’t say I don’t feel at least a little better. Just two years ago, I was still worried about what I was going to do after college, an unformed lump of Play-Doh.
This year I was also nominated for Master Columnist and was part of the CNA’s nomination for Best Coverage of Government. So, from personality-focused stories to photography, and personal writing to important articles, I had a lot to celebrate over the last year.
The awards themselves are nice to have. I took a few photos of me holding them like a goof before hanging them up in our office, but I can’t really feel too attached. I don’t do this whole writing thing for the award.
It got me thinking a lot about why I do write. Not just the stuff for the paper but for my own fun in things like my diary or media journals. As someone who tries hard at least once a week to express personal thoughts, I always thought of writing as closer to catharsis than anything else.
As I got back to the office after the awards, I thought about how nothing really changed afterward, which I expected. The award is an honor, but it’s not meant to do anything except look a little shiny. Congrats on working hard, time to get back to work.
Any time I do gloat in my life about my achievements, I always try to make sure there’s a sense of irony. I think attaching myself to my achievements more than my soul or personality, however you want to put it, isn’t healthy.
But there’s something enticing and cosmically funny now that I’m officially an award-winning journalist. I got to annoy my friends from high school about that after I won; that’s what all those goofy photos were for.
The thing is, I don’t think I’m the type to be a journalist. I’m a brutally introverted person, somewhat uncurious toward the world around me and I always leaned toward humor than trying to legitimately connect with people. Yet, here I am.
In high school I was more concerned about movies and video games than I was with studying, especially once the pandemic rolled around in my senior year. I still went to college, worked pretty hard to get a degree in journalism and ended up where I am now.
Am I more mature now than then?
If I’m being honest, I don’t think maturity will come natural to me at this point. My coworkers deal with me on a daily basis but I’ve become a professional at annoying them when we should be working. Because I knew it would make them laugh, I said the other day, “I think pan pizza changed my life.” (Try it sometime, the pizza, not the phrase, it’s that good.)
Obviously immature, but I think there’s more to it. For a long time, I think I really wanted to appear smart or become some version of me people will like because being liked isn’t something that was overly common in my life. I do think I’m a dumb person sometimes, and maybe, without me realizing it, I’ve tried to exorcise the dumbness out.
But it’s not me to pretend to be smart. It’s me to say the new drink I bought is “the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” It’s me to dream about a cross-country road trip to see a game in every MLB ballpark. It’s me to hoard balloons and random trinkets that make a bunch of noise at my desk. I’m essentially an ape who figured out how to type on a computer.
That’s the me that makes me smile. There’s something really powerful about thinking how that version of me wrote a few stories, took a few pictures, and those things were somehow worthy of awards. How those things that I created with my dumb brain meant something to someone.
Somehow, Nick Pauly, who figured out how to wavedash in “Super Smash Bros. Melee” (the one for the GameCube) before he knew how to make pancakes, became an award-winning journalist. I can’t help but laugh it off.