These are the nights I can't sleep. The newsroom chaos invades my dreams, pulling me down to the ocean's depths.
Our story in Dallas has become all too common: We must reduce the size of our newsroom. We have received and considered our buyout offers, or, as the corporation calls them, "voluntary severance packages." Whatever they're called, our lives have changed. Our lives will change. We have said goodbye to good people.
We have said goodbye to people we love and admire.
In the dark hours, I watch movies. Sometimes, movies help me make sense of the fractured narrative I'm living. I turn to "
Lost in Translation," the 2003 film starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. The two lead characters, Bob and Charlotte, cross paths in Tokyo. Neither can sleep because of the time difference. Both feel lonely and out of place in the Japanese culture. Both are adrift in their lives. The younger Charlotte struggles for a sense of purpose. The older Bob, a movie star past his prime, has lost his way.
A romantic spark brings the two together. But they part ways knowing only the intimacy of friendship, and a fleeting one at that. Yet somehow their brief connection has changed their lives for the better. The connection has given them a focus, has propelled them out of their inertia.
In the newsroom chaos, we can lose our way. We can lose our sense of purpose.
"It's like a free fall," one of my colleagues says. "It's as if there are no rules." The uncertainty, laced with anger and anxiety, disorients us. Fear can make us leave, and fear can make us stay.
How can we find our focus? How can we come to understand who we are, and what is important to us?
As I reflect on the disorientation, I consider it in another context: It is the key to embracing diversity. Maybe that's why it's so hard to incorporate diversity into our journalism. As journalists, we are driven to make sense of things, to explain them.
We pursue clarity.
We do everything we can to avoid the disorientation.
We try to divine the simple within the complex. So it's often safer to stick with topics, events and people familiar to us. Reporting on people who are different from us, writing about cultures that lie outside our personal experience -- all of this demands our disorientation. There is that moment when you approach the person whom you have, for so long, perceived as the Other. Will he understand what you're saying? What could you possibly have in common? Will he come to trust you? Will you trust him?
You have to take a leap of faith. But even as you do, the disorientation comes. Some of his attitudes and ways of life will mystify you. A part of him will remain unknowable. You won't have any cultural reference points. You are now out of your comfort zone. To stay there, you will have to find some comfort in being uncomfortable.
You will have to accept that your narrative won't be as tidy as you'd like it to be.
A while back,
I thought of travel as a metaphor for our pursuit of journalism with a difference. That metaphor still holds for me. "Fear keeps us home, with our passports gathering dust," I wrote. "Similarly, fear keeps us in our journalistic routines."
Last November, my girlfriend and I traveled to Japan. We wandered the Tokyo streets, overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic craziness. Teenagers roamed the shopping districts, pampered and indulged in what otherwise seemed to be a culture of restraint, discipline and tradition. Girls dressed as French maids and other characters. In Akihabara, the electronics district, the cool kids and the nerds mingled in six-story warehouses packed with the latest anime DVDs, manga books, soft-core porn and every action figure imaginable.
And yet, this was also the city of ancient temples, bustling fish markets, graceful tea ceremonies.
How do you understand any of those juxtapositions? How do you even
begin to build a context for it? You can understand some of it, but not all of it.
Just as you will inevitably get lost in the streets of Tokyo, you must give yourself over to the disorientation.
It's late at night, and I'm listening to "Alone in Kyoto," a song by the French electronica band,
Air. I'm reminded of a gray sky, and raindrops on a windowpane, and how that image can sometimes make me shiver.
The song underscores a pivotal scene in "Lost in Translation." Charlotte ventures by herself to Kyoto. Outside a temple, she spies a bride and groom, dressed in traditional garb. She doesn't understand everything about the tradition she's observing, but it's a beautiful moment. In her face, you can see something open up within her.
In her discovery of something beautiful in the foreign, she discovers something within herself: the ability to feel and to want. And perhaps the ability to take responsibility for living her own life.
And so that is what we face in the newsroom chaos.
We expected to live our lives in a certain way, but now that is gone. We stayed within our routines, and some of us found comfort in the inertia. But that's no longer possible. Whether we stay or go, we all will walk down the path of uncertainty.
Will we remain journalists? Will we become teachers? Will we go into another business? We all will face the disorientation. We all will have to take responsibility for our own direction. And that is a scary prospect.
These are the nights I can't sleep.
I am an advertising student who had to check out...
