FINDING HER PLACE

Honing In What does it mean to find your place?

By Lorelai Finoch

Central Focus Editor-in-Chief

As we reach the second quarter of the year, the majority of college applications have started rolling out, and with them arises my entirely contradictory but ever-constant fear of planning for the future. The idea of moving on from here, from this monotonous day-to-day has always been an appealing daydream, one that’s pushed me to look past the immediate future and consider the many places I want to go. However, in reality, this examination of how my life could be has always been so unattainable. So colossal. So, simply put, scary.

To combat this, making fairly well-structured plans has been the key to my typically elusive motivation for years, as the fear of imminent deadlines and immovable appointments is all that really keeps me going when I’m running strictly on fumes, as I know is largely the case for many of my peers (a problem that none of us outwardly address, that only grows more outrageous). But laying the foundation for the next four years of my life has been stressful, to say the least, and if I may go a step further, absolutely migraine-inducing.

There have been few times in my life where I was sure of who I was and what I wanted. This isn’t a surprise, by any means. I’m a teenager. A child. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing a month from now, let alone five years, so how could I really understand where I’m going? How could any of us, who’ve barely seen the outside of our hometowns? But even when I think I have an idea, the slightest inkling, of whatever it is that I might be looking towards, there’s always been something missing.

That something has varied from activity to activity, but it all sums up to one thing: it’s all right that I don’t particularly excel in these areas, but I’m not motivated to try to be better, either. Because of this, I always felt out of place, like the people around me were always a step ahead. Like I wasn’t as good as I should’ve been.

Then, at the beginning of my junior year, coming off of over a year of social distancing and virtual learning, I found myself a staff reporter in room 139. I was terrified. I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to do it. I was lost and there was no foreseeable way for me to manage it. Then I got my first assignment. I wrote my interview questions, my rough draft, I got my first edits, and then it was finished.

I had spent the previous year working with a virtual staff made up of students from Howell, North, and Central, but none of it was ever published. Nobody knew where it was supposed to go. But now, I

Illustration by Emily Sirtak

was working with a group that, while thrown off by the pandemic, knew what they were doing and what they were working towards. This meant that I finally had something tangible to work toward. Something that would display my work. Something that finally let me share my writing with whatever fraction of an audience it would find.

That something gave me a renewed sense of motivation. My work wasn’t just going to gather dust in my Google Drive. It was going to be seen and enjoyed and criticized. It was going to be given the choice of being ignored, instead of being swept aside because there wasn’t anywhere for it to go.

That’s around where I would date the start of it: my enjoyment, my investment, my desire to improve. It wasn’t something I’d seen in a while, but when that feeling came back, when I realized it was this work that had given it to me, the trap was set and there was no pulling myself out of it. This is what I would do. No matter how unimportant it may seem, how unimpressive or unremarkable, this idea of writing, of communicating and informing, it was exactly what I had been looking for.

The paper gave me that need to improve that I had always seen in others around me: my friends in choir, my peers on sports teams, my teachers in their jobs. I finally knew where I wanted to try.

I wasn’t amazing, by any means. Looking back now, I find myself cringing at mistakes that don’t even occur to me, at this point. My skills were rough around the edges and they needed refining, but I was eager to do it. To sand them down and color them over with stain.

Then the end of the school year loomed closer and closer. Almost all of our editors were seniors, and I was determined to put myself out there…until I actually had to put myself out there.

I was absolutely terrified. Who was I? Who was I to reach for an editor’s position after only my first year on a real staff? Who was I, who had been nothing more than an ordinarily performing student?

These questions appeared often, even in the midst of writing my editor application. Even when I was getting ready to send it to our adviser. Even when it had already been submitted.

I knew the answer, I think, to the questions I’d asked myself over and over again, it just took me a while to realize it. I was myself. I was the person that had spent so long spending time in a feeling of apathy, knowing I wouldn’t be great and choosing not to try to at least be better. I was the person that was hit in the face with the realization of what it was to try, the person who asked themself why they didn’t do so in the first place. Damn the challenges and hardships.

For so long, I thought that to truly enjoy something, you had to excel. But to be good is one thing. To try is completely another, and just as completely fulfilling.