Last night at approximately 7 p.m., my well of blog ideas was as dry as [a bone, the Sahara desert, your mouth after you eat a saltine, my history professor last semester]. Whatever you choose to fill in the blank, the point is that I was dropping the ball. I’m not kidding. Here was my brainstorming list: 

I’m not really sure why I thought writing “Come on, think of something” would help me, well, think of something, and the ending, “AHHH,” felt like the only utterance appropriate for my current lack of keenly perceptive analogies and fascinating scientific discoveries. I tried my usual tactic of sitting in front of my computer with my eyes closed, poring over the events of the week in my mind’s eye, but to no avail. I replayed, over and over again, conversations I’d had, interactions with the kids, things I had been planning, but nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Quite frankly, I was over it. I guess necessity really is the mother of invention though, because then I wrote this. I was getting desperate.

Sarah’s Hope of Finding Something to Write About

My alarm goes off. I get up but I drag my feet because I’m tired. I go downstairs. I make scrambled eggs. I pack my lunch and my work bag. I go back upstairs and get dressed. I do my hair and makeup. I grab my computer off the charger, bring it down stairs, and put it in my bag. I put my shoes on. I say “Bye, love you!” to my dad. I leave the house. I open the garage door. I start the car. I turn on a podcast. I . . . 

Wait. Back the truck up. The podcast. It’s an award winning one called Serial, and it tells a true story, week by week, every season. It’s hosted and produced by a reporter named Sarah Koenig, who was one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2015, and who also worked as a producer on another well-known podcast called This American Life. My friend David introduced me to it a few weeks ago, and ever since then, I’ve been hooked. For 21 straight days, my drive to work has been filled with the voices of reporters, defense attorneys, judges, police officers, witnesses, the subjects of the stories themselves, and of course, Sarah Koenig. The show’s iconic intro has become a kind of comfort for me: “For this American Life and WEBZ Chicago, it’s Serial, one story told week by week. I’m Sarah Koenig.” 

When I was a senior in high school, I began writing for my school’s newspaper. I had always enjoyed the writing process, but my journalistic undertakings at The Lantern added some real fuel to the fire, in a good way. When I wrote my first story, I actually wasn’t even officially on the staff. I had taken an introductory journalism class my sophomore year, and I submitted one of our assignments as a guest piece. (You can read it here—I’ve come a long way since then). 

As my senior year continued on, I wrote two more stories, big ones. They were tributes to two students who had passed away: one of an overdose, and one from suicide. They taught me a lot of things, but mostly that our words have the power to change people: change their minds, change their feelings, and allow them to view an issue from a perspective they’d never considered. And that’s what I liked about Sarah Koenig’s reporting. It was simple, yet thorough, and it was unbiased. If she interviewed the defendant in a court case and they told her a story, and then she heard another part of the story from the police officer that arrested him, and maybe another part from a witness, she’d simply pause, reflect, and say something like, “Well, I don’t know what really happened, because I wasn’t there. But, at least I have Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C, who all experienced the same event, yet each from a unique perspective. If I put them all together, I can make a fair conclusion about the real course of events.” I love listening to her, and not just because she has the same name as me. It’s good reporting, plain and simple. (I know I’m nerding out about journalism right now, but you would be too, if you listened to this podcast). 

I think living a good life is sort of like writing a good story. If you only write from one perspective, you’ll never get the whole picture. If Sarah Koenig were reporting on that same court case, she could write a story derived only from the defendant, only from the people who liked the defendant or thought he wasn’t guilty. The problem with this, though, is that it eliminates the possibility to discover that, maybe the defendant is guilty because he lied during the interview, or maybe a witness saw something else, something that neither the police nor the attorneys could have told Sarah. 

When I finally stumbled upon my idea for this blog, I shared it with a friend, and, in turn, he shared this parable:

Three blind men are up close with an elephant.

One at the trunk says, “It’s a snake!”

One at the side says, “No, you’re wrong. It’s a wall!”

Yet another one by a leg says, “No, you’re both wrong. It’s a pillar!”

No matter where the men were standing, it was still an elephant, even if they didn’t see it that way. That’s kind of how life is too. (Also, I found it funny that a parable about a change of perspective was in my brainstorming list, long before I shared my idea with my friend). 

Westfield, Indiana, where I grew up, is a sheltered place. While tragedies like overdoses and shootings do happen, they’re not by any means run of the mill, and they’re kind of taboo. People don’t like to talk about them. I wrote in another blog post that I like to be honest, so I will be now too. I don’t know what it’s like to live in a place where those things happen frequently, and to people you know. 

This internship, though, is sort of like a magnifying glass into a whole different world, one that I’ve never experienced. I’ve been standing at the trunk of the elephant my whole life, but this summer, I’ve slowly been making my way around to its leg. I go home wondering what it would be like, to have an incarcerated parent, or a dead one, or to not even be able to go home. It’s like the new interview to my life story. I’ve realized that if you never take a step into the lives of those around you, if you never try to walk from the trunk to the leg to the side, your perspective of the way life works is going to be pretty jaded. You’ll have a hard time understanding that the choices that people make and the ways they act are so often a product of their circumstances, and not simply because they want to be in a difficult place. Let me end with a quote from Sterling K. Brown, an Emmy and Golden Globe award winning actor, who also followed Sarah Koenig as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People a few years later in 2018: “Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.” So, I’m going to challenge you this week. Begin the walk from the trunk to the side. Begin a new interview in your life story. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally see the elephant.