why i do what i do
i did not become a journalist for the career.
sometimes, i hate being a journalist.
in those moments, journalism is a barbed wire under my skin. tbh, this is how writing itself often feels for me. finding words and assembling them in the order i need involves a lot of burrowing. usually, it’s the good kind of painful and weird, like tweezing an ingrown hair.
but sometimes, i get sick of the wire.
i fantasize about leaving this industry. i don’t have any misconceptions that there’d be much mourning over my doing so. the idea of leaving isn’t about making a spectacle. i don’t care if anyone cares. all i want is to leave my drafts unfinished, toss my notebooks full of scattered thoughts (story ideas, organizations to look into, potential contacts, fellowships, residencies — things to apply for that i’ll never remember), and delete myself from the internet.
to do what?
don’t know.
the thing about this feeling is i know it arises from my own forgetfulness.
why did i become a journalist?
i get asked some version of that question often enough that i have a rehearsed answer. see: it started with community organizing. after i participated in Ferguson October, a national call for action, i went back to Minnesota and thought, “hey, this place is fucked too.” so i co-founded the Black Liberation Project, a grassroots collective of Black youth throughout the Twin Cities, and…
blah blah blah.
to be clear: nothing i ever say in response to that question is a lie. going to Ferguson changed the trajectory of my life. it was the reason i co-founded BLP. and i 100% got into journalism because of community organizing. more specifically, i realized that i despised organizing. i didn’t like the level of relationship building that being an organizer required. i didn’t like people feeling as if they knew and deserved access to me. i hated the constant beefing. i was overwhelmed and organizing spaces made me unforgiving and volatile.
i wanted out.
how do you go from trying to build the revolution to forgetting about it entirely, though? you can’t. i had spent so much time preaching that people didn’t need to be “boots on the ground” to help the movement. i couldn’t ignore what i’d been saying. if i didn’t want to organize anymore, fine, but there had to be something. eventually, i fgured, why not write? it’s the one thing i’m good at without any help. i didn’t feel as if i had to reconstruct my entire person to do it.
on wednesday, i was reading an interview with hannah black, who said, “The individual is an expression of social forces, an expression of history, and the individual is part of history and makes history. That’s the wager of writing, I think; it’s what makes writing interesting.”
i think about my role as an individual often, especially as i dive deeper into Afrofuturism. i think about history — the present/past, the future — and all the things i don’t yet know that have made me. sometimes, though, it’s easy to forget the things about myself that i do know.
last week, i hated being a journalist again. it happens when i get caught up in journalism as a career. don’t get me wrong: i do hate this industry and always will. that’s not a problem. more often than not, Journalism does a disservice to oppressed communities. i mean, this is an anti-surveillance newsletter, and how often are big outlets recycling state narratives regarding “terrorism” / “extremism” as fact?
plus, i hate the lack of opportunities for any sort of stability. when i think five years ahead, i don’t see myself with a full-time job or any benefits. i see myself working part-time gig after part-time gig. nothing better than the freelancing i tried to leave behind. i despise being praised for projects that i have to create on the outside. people see these projects as some sign of my work ethic — extracurriculars. they are not. projects like NAZAR are developed out of necessity, that’s all.
but i did not become a journalist for the career.
simply put, writing is how i embody a liberation theology. the same liberation theology that i sought to live out in the time i spent organizing. this is my Islam in practice. i mean: "Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is an oppressed one. People asked, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! It is all right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "By preventing him from oppressing others."
isn’t that what i’m doing here?
or, what i’m supposed to be doing?
i don’t know how NAZAR ended up on hiatus again — blame the pandemic, i guess. i’ve been meaning to bring it back for months. that note keeps getting shuffled from to-do lists. it felt overwhelming to start this up again. since i’ve launched NAZAR, i’ve been trying hard to separate myself from the idea that every second of my free time needs to be spent on working and trying to get ahead. i’ve picked up a hobby that requires as much time as a part-time job. i’ve got friends that i try to be good to and that requires time as well.
i realize it’s beyond time, though. i’ve been losing track of why i do what i do. i don’t want to lose myself in the mindset of competition. as a journalist, i am competing with nobody. not because i don’t think anyone could compare to me (plenty of people can) but cause i don’t fucking want to.
it’s part of why i stopped freelancing as much. you start to feel pressure to compete. out here chasing bylines as if it matters. what does a byline really say? why would i feel sad i’m not published in the Times, for example, when i constantly ridicule it for being an illustration of everything i hate about Journalism as an industry? i stopped freelancing to refocus. stopped seeing it as a way to pay my bills and got pickier about what i spent my time on.
now, i need to bring NAZAR back for the same reason.
the focus of NAZAR is very much the same. i’ll be changing the format some (no more organizing roundup, as i end up wanting to feature half these orgs anyway) and the publishing date is now every other Friday at 8am EST. these are minor changes that make NAZAR much more sustainable. internally, i’m reminding myself that NAZAR is not part of any career aspirations. any pressures i put on it and myself for that reason can go.
i don’t want this newsletter to go on. just know, i’m thrilled to be working on shit again. and if nothing else, i wanted to make these thoughts public so if i ever forget why i’m doing what i do, it will be easy to re-center myself. nobody holds you accountable like past you.
if you want to contact me, hit up: nazarnewsletter@protonmail.com.
otherwise, see y’all in March.