I first stepped into the newsroom on August 23, 2022, expecting nothing but at the same time wanting it to be my everything.

From birth to my sophomore year of high school, I never felt like I had something I was good at. Something that people would ask me about and my face would light up as I spoke about it. I considered myself a bit of a quitter with everything I started.

Soccer? Quit. Volleyball? Quit. Flute? Quit. The list is much longer than that, trust me, but you get the point.

My choice to join the news staff has been the best choice of my high school career. The newsroom and the people in it quickly became my safe place, a place where I knew I could speak and be heard. Growing up I was always writing. I wrote down just about everything I could think of. Stories, memories, ideas and people I’ve met. I never paid much attention to the fact that I enjoyed doing it because I was so caught up in wanting to have a “traditional talent.” I finally realized sports were not my thing (I hate whoever invented running) and did what I always did: I quit. And I sulked.

I didn’t know myself, let alone what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The high school pressures of entering junior year with no plan in mind crippled me with anxiety as I saw all my peers around me already have top choices for college and majors and knew without a doubt in their minds what was ahead for them. I felt stuck and voiceless. Then I wrote my first news story and knew it was exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

The space in my head that was constantly writing finally had a place to pour out. I was astonished by the freedom a high school news publication had. I could write about pretty much anything I wanted. Opinions, stuff in the news I cared about, art, sports, etc. Third-period journalism class became the reason I jumped out of bed on Monday mornings.

“So this is what it feels like to have a passion,” I would think to myself every time I sat in front of my computer to write a story.

It didn’t really hit me that people were reading the things that I wrote until I would get compliments on my articles. It felt insane to know that people saw one of my headlines and clicked on it. They spent their time reading or watching something I produced. Being Editor-In-Chief also boosted me with a new sense of responsibility and allowed me to be as involved as I possibly could be with the news productions. I gained inspiration by proofreading my classmates’ articles and bouncing ideas back and forth with them monthly. We became involved in press conferences with the superintendent, reporting on news that matters to our community, and even won multiple awards from the Iowa High School Press Association.

I no longer felt lost and I no longer felt like my words were drowning in a crowd of noise. I began looking at colleges and journalism majors that I wanted to pursue and started scouting for camps and conferences that would make me a better writer. I came home every night bursting at the seams excited to tell my parents what happened in journalism class or what I was going to write about this month. It was a totally new spark. I would see things happen around me and think “That’s a news story.”

Cultivating my love for writing allowed me to know who I am and who I want to be. This class taught me the most valuable lesson I’ve had in all my years of schooling. I learned that every single person has a voice, you just have to find it.