I still remember the first time I felt really in over my head. I was doing my 201-­2 project on single moms, and went out to the suburbs to spend an afternoon with a widowed mom and her non- verbal autistic son. She politely answered my questions while she pried his hands from the bottom of the emergency exit door he was trying to pull open. He screamed, over and over again, a sort of piercing scream that bounced around in my head. I thought—what the fuck am I doing here? Why did we talk for so long about how to crop a photo in lecture and we never talked about how to be a real human when you’re interviewing other real humans? I just cried and cried when I got back to the Metra station. It was the day I got my first editing position at NBN.

I don’t really consider myself a writer. The last time I kept a journal was when I was 6 and detailed my love for a 7-­year-­old named Matt. But in my time at Medill, I’ve found that writing can be about much more than being a writer. Writing, for me, is like getting stitches. Here is this gaping hole of a situation and here’s the way I’m going to tie it together for now, even if it hurts.

I found that during my sophomore year, when I wrote a personal essay for NBN about being a victim of relationship abuse. I sat in counseling week after week, and wondered quite the same thing as I had the year before—what the fuck am I doing here? Write hard and clear about what hurts, Hemingway once said. So I wrote about what hurt like hell. I wrote about the therapy and the night terrors and the scars someone gave me.

And to do that, I had to give my writing to someone else—editors. I had to let someone else help stitch up the wound. It went from being something in my head, to a cursor flashing on and off on a Google doc, to being someone else’s responsibility. My pain, my thoughts, my fears, they’d become a collaboration.

When it was published, a community appeared. Or I suppose it didn’t appear, it was probably always there, but it was the first time I’d really realized I had it. I watched as one Facebook post after another appeared sharing my story, as emails from professors I’d never had filled up my inbox, as someone I just took a single class with in high school messaged me to say she’d been abused, too. It was overwhelming, and lovely, and it changed how I saw writing.

I took that community to heart when I was in charge at NBN. I had a staff of writers and editors, of people who cut words and checked AP style and interviewed sources. But in them, I also had a weird collection of humans who were trying to learn and grow and make it through college. And I wanted them to love doing all of those things together, so in our meetings, I always made sure there was time to talk about stories, but also exciting things going on in our lives. I also always made sure there were baked goods. I think baked goods are an important part of being a human too.

Writing is about creating a community, much like the one I found at NBN. It’s about saying here is this thing I care about, maybe you will care about it too, maybe you will find a little bit of the strangeness or hope or excitement or healing I found in this. Or maybe you’ll find something completely different, but it’s something we’re going to share. Here we go.