It's been six long months. Six really long months.
My first job away from home has been quite a pain and still I declined a job offer I got last month to come back to my previous job at the news station and be a producer.
I was a fool.
Picking my dreams over practicality. Psst...what a joke (There is some sarcasm present.)
If you read my last post months ago, you know that Robeson County is the pits. So is crime reporting.
I have a love-hate relationship with this beat. It can be exciting, but emotionally exhausting. It gets the most reads, but it also provokes the most angry phone calls...or even worse, the most tearful.
I've been a little stressed and my anxiety is through the roof. Let me tell ya something, if you have an anxiety disorder and want to go into journalism, I wouldn't recommend the cops and court beat. Stick with puppies and fairs. Just sayin'. But, I will say, I have learned a lot, and I'm going to try my best to continue my career in journalism. I'm paying my dues, I shouldn't expect the first job to be ideal. If I told me in the 10th grade that I got this far and gave up, I'd probably smack me. Wait, did that make sense?
Alas, the stresses of my job have made me a little irrational. After covering several murders, trials, and hundreds of arrests, you get a little paranoid.
And paranoia leads to fear. In may case, it just exacerbates my already deep-seeded fears, my most current: failure.
Well, I'm tired of being scared. I'm a prisoner of fear and my anxiety has increased to a point where I'm accidently killing myself - meaning if a doctor checked out my heart rate at any point, it would be a series of scribbles. I'm 24 and working on a heart attack.
So, besides the obvious solution of finding the next footpath in the road of life, I'm jumping out of a plane.
I'm serious. This summer, I'm going skydiving.
I'm convinced that after this experience in Robeson County, my only cure to all my fears and anxieties is to plummet to the earth, fly through the sky, face the elements without wings.
I think if I could do something like that, I may be a braver person in the end. I would love to be a little braver. Late nights in bed when I'm wide awake and having a fear fit, I can say "wait, I jumped out of a plane and survived! I can survive this, too."
It sounds crazy but let me back-track and describe fears I've faced that have made me a stronger, less anxious person:
-Jumping out from the back of the school bus during a fire drill at 6. I spent most of kindergarten to that moment horrified that I would on of those unfortunate kids that would have to jump out the back rather than go through the normal door. The day came, I survived. Amy gets a little more ballsy.
-Moved in with my dad after the divorce at age 12. Best decision of my life and surprised I made it because I was horrified of my mom and losing her. 50 pounds and a mullet lost, life was good for me. I was 10 times stronger than before. *Disclaimer-I did lose her six years later, but let's not argue my theory, okay? Thanks.
- Riding a roller coaster at age 18. I spent most of my life avoiding them because I had a firm belief that I would have a heart attack. Don't ask where I got this idea, I guess I didn't have much confidence in my young, strong chest muscle. I finally was forced on one, loved it, felt slightly invincible...until I rode a wooden coaster that knocked my brain from it's stem.
Now, at the age of 24, I plan to jump out of a plane in hopes to get over the fear of failure. I've spent the last few months fearing I made bad decisions and that I may fail at my current job because the content was so foreign.
So, of my parachute doesn't fail, I'm in great shape, physically (no broken bones, yay!) and emotionally (failure is harder than success, yay!)
And that, my friends, was a really bad joke...the above statement that is. I'm still jumping out of a plane.
