Facing My Fears, One Class at a Time

So school has finally begun and this semester is shaping up to be quite intense, (but what else would you expect from a girl whose code name is Overachiever?) Take having a beat to cover, a clip requirement to meet, foreign language speaking skills to perfect, a series of group papers to write and chapter upon chapter of international politics to read, throw in the next four months and there's my semester in a nutshell.

The journalism gods are finally getting back at me for devoting so much of my time to the government and politics side of my double degree. I'm currently taking a second level news reporting class and boy, you science geeks thought you had it bad with orgo. Now nobody likes classes in general, but you haven't seen fear and dread until you've walked into this journalism class.

Unlike most fields of study, journalism isn't something that can be taught from a book. Therefore, our school has decided that the only way we can truly learn to be journalists is to simply, well, become journalists for a semester. Next week we will be assigned a local city to cover and each week we will be assigned a certain story to write from that beat, be it a crime story, a court story or covering a city council meeting. We will also have in-class assignments to complete and, on top of all that, we have a minimum clip requirement to meet. Outside of all the class assignments, we have to get a certain number of articles published in campus or local newspapers. And that's just ONE class I'm taking this semester.

Luckily, Karen and Nancy took the class last semester and I knew the work was coming. Karen told me if I braced myself and accepted what I was getting myself into, I'd be fine. And even though I did just that, but it was still totally scary and anxiety-inducing when it was all laid out on the syllabus in front of me.

But it's not even the amount of work that has me worried. Work, I've already shown myself, is something I can handle. What really scares me is the reporting. I've tried to avoid it for the past two years, but my fear of reporting has finally caught up to me, and I'm being forced to face it. Yes, I am a journalism major with a paralyzing, utterly irrational fear of reporting.

My anxiety over this class has gotten so bad that this morning I woke up a full hour and a half before my alarm, unsure if I had even been sleeping the whole time because I had so vividly been dreaming that I had six different articles due at six different campus newspapers, half of which do not even exist. I then was unable to fall asleep and ended up getting out of bed 30 minutes early.

It's not that I haven't done it before. I have written articles and I have interviewed people, and I'm pretty good at both. I just really, really, really hate doing it, for reasons beyond my explanation. My professor was telling us today that if going out into the field intimidates us, we'd better suck it up and get over it, otherwise we will not succeed in this class or in this profession. But I suppose that's one of the things that bothers me, that this isn't even the profession I want to go into. I'm putting forth so much effort, undergoing undue stress and anxiety in one of the most rigorous programs in the country, and for what? I have absolutely no desire to become a reporter and am sticking with the major merely for the writing skills it develops (and not to mention the fact that the degree will look great on my resumé).

But, I am determined to get an A in this class and to get over my fears, and I've done just what my professor told us to do and gotten started early. One of the campus newspapers had their assignment meeting today and I got not one but two stories to write! 2 clips down, 8 to go. But as I was walking back to my apartment with a spring in my step, all I felt was this dead weight of dread on my shoulders, knowing that I would have to actually seek out university officials for comment and I'd have to interview random people at an event next week. And even though my rational mind knows that I'll be fine once I do my first interview, the irrational emotions still reign supreme and I'm petrified nonetheless.