Working as a Journalist for Nearly a Decade Made me Numb to the World Around Me
I have always considered myself an empathetic person. Then I got into TV news and my empathy, my feelings, and my emotion were slowly stolen from me. The worst part is, I didn’t even realize it — until now.
To show emotion as a journalist is one thing, to show emotion as a female journalist could be potentially career-ending, and guaranteed to set yourself up to be called weak, not credible, not assertive enough, and any other words news directors and TV consultants can drum up.
Disclaimer: I don’t mean this as an attack on journalists. I respect all of you tremendously. It just has taken me being out of the biz for nearly a year to realize what kind of an impact it truly had on me.
On January 7, 2021, it dawned on me that working as a journalist for a decade had drained me of emotion and made me numb to the world around me. I was a week out from experiencing my most emotional Christmas ever. There was no reason for my flood of overwhelming emotions. I was newly-engaged, home with my family, and having an overall great Christmas. But small things were setting me off into a puddle of tears. For instance,I saw a man on crutches walk past our table at dinner and I cried for the rest of the night thinking about peoples’ hardships. A rude Facebook comment from a man I’ve never met (something that was a daily occurrence while I worked in the news) also set off the waterworks (same dinner, what a night for my family, eh?) Tragedy and internet trolls: two things that used to be daily occurences while working as a journalist. I had been numb to them for so long, but my human feelings and emotion had since returned. It took 11 months of being exposed daily to tragedy, sadness, and internet trolls to feel human again. But, at that moment, I still didn’t realize that’s what was happening. I brushed it off and blamed hormones and being overly ecstatic that for the first time in ten years, I didn’t’ have to fly back home at 6 a.m. on December 26th and head straight from the airport (a 2-hour drive from work) to anchor the evening news.
I spent most of January 6, 2021, like most Americans, shell-shocked, disgusted, and heartbroken. Unfortunately, these feelings were nothing new. I’d reported on countless tragedies as a journalist, from The Boston Marathon Bombing, ISIS attacks, and an incomprehensibly high number of school shootings. Those are just (a few of)the big ones. Night after night, I reported on shootings, murders, rapes, fatal car accidents, fatal fires, kids being killed, sickness, disease, war, and the list goes on. Every single work day. For nearly 10 years. I am no mathematician, so I don’t know how to go about calculating the exact number of tragedies in my repertoire, but I can tell you it’s extremely high. How could I not go numb? How could I not realize I was going numb?
Sure, I often felt for the people in the news stories, even shedding an occasional tear or two on the desk during a particularly sad story. But that was it; it was on to the next story and the next day of tragic stories. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Back to the night of 1/6, I could barely stand to watch what I was seeing on TV: men with guns inside the nation’s capitol, four people dead inside the nation’s capitol, people setting fires, riots, chaos, mayhem. Then you add in social media and the inflammatory comments, the conspiracy theories,and the flat out false information, and I suddenly found myself suffocating and panicking and begging my fiancé to turn the news off. The next day, I was unable to focus and felt extremely anxious and on edge. That’s when it hit me. These feelings are normal. This was human. These are my emotions, that despite what I had been told for the past decade, I was allowed to have, I was allowed to feel, and I was allowed to talk about!
I’ve felt freedom from countless things since leaving the news biz, but the best of all is the freedom to feel my feelings and react to the world around me like a human being instead of an emotionless robot.