When I was about nine years old, I started having a hard time falling asleep at night and discovered one of my greatest talents — worrying about everything.
I would lie on the top bunk of the bed I shared with my sister, clutch my stuffed duck named Howard and stare at the popcorn ceiling, imagining every scenario where something could go wrong. My nightly prayers sounded more like pleas, especially after I watched a documentary about climate change.
“God, please don’t let the world end from global warming tomorrow,” I remember begging in fourth grade. “Because I have my first Girls on the Run 5K in the morning and I’m really excited about it.”
Now, it feels like there are more things to worry about than ever. There are AI girlfriends and federal food aid cuts and ICE detainments and measles outbreaks. I’m worried for my classmates, my neighbors and my country. It’s so easy to scroll on Instagram or check the latest New York Times notification and feel helpless — and hopeless.
This print issue is full of the things that keep me up at night. Unexpected health issues, journalism program cuts, faith questions, lonely college experiences and seven-year-olds buying anti-aging products at Sephora. But as I’ve edited these stories for the past few weeks, I haven’t felt worried. I’ve only felt present.
I cried while editing more times than I can count, but not exactly out of sadness. I’ve cried because I know what it feels like to have a health problem take you from the sport you love. And what it feels like to sit alone in your freshman dorm on Saturday night, feeling like a failure. To wish for a community where you can be yourself at Bethel.
However, I don’t know what it’s like to go through what Barbara Josephs has and still remain kindhearted and loving. But her story still made me tear up and realize how much I have left to learn.
I also cried (anyone else noticing a theme…) while reading “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin for Story in Modern America last week.
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard,” Baldwin wrote in 1957. “There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
I don’t know how to deal with living in the age of anxiety. But I won’t discover the solution by ruminating about Instagram infographics alone in my room, and I think the answer might be found in the people I walk by every day.
