After four years of working at The Daily Gamecock, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never seen me.
While I admire the newspaper reporter’s adventurous spirit — searching for truth, meeting new people, sharing their stories — I prefer to work behind the scenes, often doing the job that only gets noticed when it isn’t done right. Some people have told me my writing is bearable, but I pride myself in editing. You know, circling errors with a red pen.
It’s a peculiar passion, one founded on a strict adherence to arbitrary rules. (And before that overused slur crosses your mind, please note we prefer the term “grammar enthusiasts.”) But what can I say? I’ve got an eye for stylistic inconsistencies and a knack for restructuring awkward sentences. I consider myself lucky enough to embrace a talent that coincides with my two other favorite activities: reading, and correcting people.
Facetious quips aside, this confidence is often accompanied with a looming pressure to reach nothing short of perfection. You read, you reread, you read aloud. Nothing, you assure yourself, will slip past your innate attention to detail.
And then, when you’re trying to fall asleep hours after you’ve sent the paper to bed, it hits you. That one detail you forgot to double-check has slipped through the cracks, and it’ll be delivered into the hands of thousands of students.
Oops.
And then that’s it. You made a mistake. And you know what? There’s a chance nobody even noticed. Life goes on.
If I’ve learned anything from four years of editing on a daily deadline, it’s how to let things go. Sure, you might look stupid for a day because “atheist” was misspelled in a headline, or misogynistic because you only included the male bodybuilding competition winners, but the bright side lies in that brevity of print. You’re allowed to be upset, but only for a moment. Lingering guilt contributes nothing to the next newspaper you’ve somehow got to stitch together once again by midnight.
You breathe, you run a correction and you move on. Hopefully, you learn from it. The good work you do certainly outweighs the bad, and most of the time, the bad ain’t that bad, given the tendency to serve as our own harshest critics.
It’s a twisted sort of addiction, this newsroom. You acclimate yourself to the chaos, and all forms of work seem impossible without a ticking clock. Even now, amid what is rapidly approaching a 48-hour lack of sleep in a final attempt to complete my senior thesis, I write my farewell column at the last possible moment.
More addictive than the deadline are the people who surround you behind the scenes. Semester after semester, I’ve witnessed rotations of The Daily Gamecock staff, and each is consistently more inspiring than the last. This place attracts some of the most industrious, talented, deranged individuals out there, and their level of dedication is rivaled only by that of their lunacy.
Unlike my mistakes, it’ll be hard to let them go.