Draft Four: Don’t commit, don’t delete

Framing the future of the next letters.

Don’t commit, don’t delete, a journalist I admire said to me last week.

We were drinking Aperols in Perugia, at the International Journalism Festival, and we were talking new endeavors. We both shut down our longtime projects a year and change ago, and neither have started something since. We both had ideas, but also scars, unprocessed grief, and some guilt – maybe even shame – over failing. (If not as entrepreneurs, then maybe as leaders and managers.)

So, what should do we do with these ideas?

My friend said he was writing them down. All of them. The easy, the scary, the half-baked, the absurd, the impossible longshots. Putting them on paper was harmless, after all.

You don’t commit. You don’t delete. You just draft.

My favorite view of Perugia, which every April becomes the journalism capital of the world.

I’ll go back to writing Draft Four weekly, in this spirit.

Just starting this one took more than an hour. I walked down to a coffeeshop with two notebooks, jotted two pages, tried to structure an entry, came back, fired up Microsoft Word, and felt a wave of anxiety wash over me.

Shit.

I wrote easily all through last year, but this year – even though I set myself less pressure to deliver – I struggled through four editions and talked myself out of a couple of others. Why the resistance?

Maybe it’s the lack of consistency and schedule.

Maybe it’s the lack of clarity about the vision and future of these letters.

Maybe it’s worrying too much about the feedback and the audience’s needs.

Maybe it’s fear of saying things that might come back to bite me in the ass.

I’ve decided the only way out of this fog is to write through it.

The only way to write through something in public is to trust others will follow, and write for them, not for those that aren’t served.

The only way to write through something is by staying curious and foregoing the illusion of certainty, even at the risk of missing the mark.

Thus I’m writing through these drafts hoping it might also help you write through yours.

*

I only know how to edit for myself, says Adam Moss, a legendary magazine editor. What he means is not that the audience doesn’t matter, but that he accepts that no matter how much he tries to curate or shape stories differently, they still reflect him, and where he is in life.

This is a fundamental truth I’ve been bumping against as a writer, editor, media manager or newsroom consultant over the past year. I am curious enough to see the world from as many sides as possible, but ultimately, I’ll reflect it back in my own, subjective way. Some people are not interested. Some are downright hostile. Some love the work.

Could I do something that is not aligned with me? I was talking about this (admittedly privileged) dilemma with my coach in the CUNY leadership program, and I was listing to her some of my ideas and job opportunities (and offers), most of which involve me serving other newsrooms in some capacity, mostly in managerial or strategic roles. And she said two things that stuck.

The first is an obvious one – you’ve heard it before: just because you’re good at it, it doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

The second gave me pause: she talked about the ought self, the projection we have of ourselves that is based on duty. I ought to do this because it’s the right thing. I ought to do this because my parents expect me to. I ought to choose this because it makes sense, and it’s the responsible choice. I ought to join this cause because my community demands it.

So what you ought to do is one thing, but does it align with you?

When we hung up, I looked up the ought self, and it turns out there is a whole body of literature around it. It comes from psychological studies around mental health, and it’s centered around the idea of self-discrepancy. Self-discrepancy theory, developed in the 1980s by Edward Tory Higgins, says we have three modes of self-representation:

• The actual self, defined by traits and attributes we currently have;

• The ideal self, defined by desired attributes, skills, and an ideal version of us (including ideal aspirations);

• The ought self, defined by the version of ourselves we feel we should be out of a sense of duty or obligation.

Tension between the actual self and the ideal/ought selves creates emotional vulnerability, which manifests as either worry and anxiety, or sadness and depression. Many research studies have since shown strong relation between these discrepancies and emotional distress, leading all the way to mental health issues.

Wow, I thought. This makes so much sense. Whenever I’m disappointed at myself for not having lived up to ideal standards, I feel dejected, and disappointed. When I feel I’ve betrayed a sense of duty, I’m fearful and guilty. Most of the times I’m disillusioned, I’m in a discrepancy of one form or another.

*

I’m the kind of person who needs to experience something, grasp around for explanation, and then put it in a framework.

Being in between lives, as I’ve come to describe my current personal and professional predicament, is acute discrepancy. And that’s because in-between states offer choices: Where do I go next? Who do I become? What do I want from a future partner? Who are my people? What is my work? What is it I need? What is it that I want to give back?

I’m not worried about finding the correct answer. But over the past months I did feel a more acute tension around the different questions above that I couldn’t quite articulate, and now I can. The discrepancies got starker, and they felt different. Of course, they did!

It feels different to imagine the ideal vs. the ought. It’s not that one is bad, and one is good, it’s about discerning which one you’re going through, and how your actual self makes peace with them.

*

What does this have to do with journalism?

Everything.

For the past 20 years I’ve come to think of journalism – or more specifically put, nonfiction storytelling, as a way to guide people through this tension. I’ve first felt it while listening to This American Life as an anxious 20-something, stuck far away from Romania, in Columbia, Missouri, USA, where I got my masters. It’s OK, every episode told me. You’re not alone. We all go through pain, embarrassment, shame, loss, discomfort, and eventually we’ll emerge on the other side. Maybe not victorious, but wiser. Trust the process that is life. It’s not a game where you keep leveling up. It’s a journey with twists and turns, ups and downs. It’s a good story, and stories, as Rebecca Solnit says, are about “the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.”

It soothed me.

This is what I wanted for readers while editing DoR – for stories to guide them through the process of becoming themselves. And not only that: to show them that empathy, vulnerability, curiosity can trump cynicism, and fortify hope, which – ideally – can lead to action, transformation, belonging.

There was an entire theory of change behind the storytelling we did, and it often worked.

I was reminded of that this week, which coincidentally marked 15 years since we cooked up DoR over beers in a then newly opened pub called Bordello’s. Thursday night I was in Curtea de Argeș, about two hours outside of Bucharest, watching a live storytelling show that owes its spirit to our DoR Lives. On stage, people were sharing vulnerable personal stories, and a room of more than 200 others were watching, taking it in, feeling less alone themselves. (I’ve had a similar experience in December).

And then, after the show, I met a former DoR reader who came to the show from a different city and brought her friends along (they said they loved the community feeling of the gathering). A couple of days earlier she actually wrote to me on Instagram that our stories “helped people grow and change. I consider it part of my education. It sounds cheesy, but that’s what happened”.

This has always been my favorite kind of feedback: people saying the best DoR stories were guides as they navigated transitions and tensions, and grew up. All we did in the process is attempt to guide them along, with care, and compassion. When that worked, a bond formed.

I (still) strongly believe in this form of relational story-driven journalism.

But journalism is also where cynics excel. And we need them, too, especially when holding corrupt power to account. But journalism can – and should – also shape spaces for care, for empowerment, for dignity, for self-discovery. It can be a form of connection – especially when done through events –, it can be empathy training, it can be a guide to belonging and to acting alongside others, for our common good.

*

It turns out nothing much has changed for me.

I still believe this is what true stories can do if done sincerely, with care, and generosity.  (There are people and projects cynically trying to sell you this, too, unfortunately).

The self-discrepancy framework and the last few weeks have crystalized something. The environment I’m in is making the tensions more painful. I’m in a journalism/creative industries environment here in Romania where cynicism is strong, trust is low, gossip reigns, vulnerability is weakness, and care-driven work is considered soft. (And soft is bad).

It’s been like this since I can remember, but when I ran an organization that pushed against these forces, I guess I had more armor on.

For the past year and a half I’ve tried to approach journalists and newsrooms as I did my team and our work, and boy did I get my ass kicked. I heard that such storytelling doesn’t matter, that personal essays are irrelevant, that care doesn’t lead to efficiency and profit, that you have to be impartial and allow abusers of all kinds a voice, that left-leaning progressives are destroying the fabric of our “objective newsrooms”, that a publication’s tone needs to be sharp and cutting. (Can you sense the gender, power, and ideological undertones to much of the above?).

I still see it as a part of my duty to help our local field be better and more diverse, and I believe part of its financial woes and lack of trust from the audience exist because they double down on old-fashioned definitions of what a newsroom and a journalist are for.

But my focusing on this, on the ought self, let’s say – the self that ought to give back even in the face of resistance – has exacerbated my feelings of worthlessness, of not belonging, of not being enough, of having to prove myself, and my ideas. (The loneliness I mentioned in my last letter had a lot to do with this).

And then I spent a week in Perugia at the journalism festival and felt I belonged again – to a community, and to myself. Yes, we had cynics there, too. But we also had people who believed in care, and hope, and solutions. And they didn’t spend as much time as we do trying to prove one another wrong – some not only co-existed, but collaborated and co-created. They were assertive and compassionate. They were under threat, but not vengeful. They were dogged, but also careful. They saw hope in the dark.

*

To reduce self-discrepancy, my coach proposed, fit the opportunities around the values. If too many values clash, and I choose a path just by listening to the ought self, I might go deeper down a spiral of sadness. If I want transformation, I can’t contribute to it from sadness.

I know my values, and I also know my ideal aspirations. They are embedded in the ideas that I didn’t commit to, but nor have I deleted them. Yes, I still feel an energy gap to make them come true, and still feel a difficulty stepping out of my self-imposed loneliness to give them a try.

But I’ve also been here before, to some degree. And experience has shown me that it’s the people who bring the energy. So that’s where I am today: looking for the people alongside whom we can make new systems and new stories come to life, with an ethics of care and a mindset of being useful guides through turbulent times, personal and social.

*

If this all sounds a bit abstract, I’m sorry. I’m writing through many ideas and possibilities as we speak. Which is why, as I said earlier, I’ll resume writing weekly. So here’s what you will be reading in these letters, should you continue to follow along:

• Doing care-informed storytelling in various forms;

• Exploring the impact of journalism at a human scale, especially as guide for navigating tension;

• Finding how journalism can inform community and belonging;

• Understanding what communities of place or practice need from journalists to create more connection, which can maybe lead to co-creation, and action;

• What I’m doing with the local journalism community to break at least some of us out of self-imposed exiles and/or give us alternative professional paths;

• Other projects I’ll take on in which to test some of the ideas above;

• People that bring this energy.

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SIDE DISHES:

1. Two interviews with two brilliant editors: Adam Moss, formerly of New York Magazine, talking about the process of making art and editing it. (“I think any editing is just a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. I think you’re just being super sensitive to the way in which your mind is reacting, or your heart is reacting.”) And David Remnick of the New Yorker.

2. Some takeaways from the Perugia Journalism Festival: a list from the Reuters Institute, and one from my local colleagues at Scena9, who were there with their whole staff.

3. Also at Perugia I had the pleasure of playing cheerleader for Recorder, a brilliant local investigative outlet. They talked about making long-form video investigations that top the YouTube trending charts, building a solid reader revenue model and more. The session recording is here.

4. Read Noaptea nu uită (The Night Doesn’t Forget), a lively novel by my former colleague Silvia Dumitru; it’s a story of self-discrepancy and coming into your own in the craziness of modern Bucharest.