Middle school was a kaleidoscope — no, an apocalypse of emotions. I was renowned for being sensitive and eliciting the concern, “he’s about to cry,” whenever I hung out with other kids. My peers would call me a loner, causing me to isolate myself because I was ignored and shut down by society.

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Let me share my story.

 

I was not timid at first. In elementary school, I was the outgoing social butterfly who flew without a care in the world. My life was, in my opinion, a utopia — supportive friends, jubilant teachers, and a sense of predictability and routine.

 

In middle school, though, I lost touch with my friends who ventured to different schools. I lost my admiration of the clock ticking to recess and play to my heart’s content. I lost almost everything that made me smile.

 

Life as a middle schooler, for me at least, was a chore — go to school, wait for classes to open while enduring the burden of a sunflower pod of eyes glaring and putting weight on my shoulders (in other words: survive), embrace how people shut me out of their cliques to preserve my role as the loner, survive, go to band rehearsal, go home, sleep, and repeat.

 

I hated being alone and pessimistic. Even more, I hated how I thought it was normal to be isolated.

 

In my last year of middle school, I had to decide on classes to enroll in high school. I skimmed over the list of course names, hoping to find at least one class that rarely had anything to do with social interaction.

 

Band was my first choice. After all, playing the flute is a pastime that empowered me to endure the bumpy, lonely roller coaster to middle school graduation.

 

It was then I noticed an interesting class: Newswriting. I thought, “if it has ‘writing’ in it, then it must mean that there’s no talking involved and it is an Eden of introverts like me!”

 

On the first day of class, though, I wondered “Have I made a mistake?”

 

That day, I had to learn to interview my classmates. We all sat in a circle and took turns to talk about why we took Newswriting and jot it down. I love big words and could be repetitive  ever since I spent most of my time in isolation browsing the English dictionary. I ended up with the most complex but incomprehensible notes that exceeded the word limit when writing articles for the school newspaper, The Pinion.

 

My adviser noticed my tendency to be wordy and gave me advice. She said I should treat each word as a penny if I were publishing my stories in a professional newspaper. Monetizing my word choices is a skill for any writer, not just journalists, and primed my brain on how to rephrase every sentence so that it is still condensed with information and redundant-free; in other words, getting the most bang for the buck.

 

The first month of Newswriting was easy. I just had to listen to recordings of people talking, transcribe them, and write my articles. Very little social interaction was necessary.

 

However, once my adviser assigned the class to find a source to interview to start writing their first feature article, a hoard of daddy-long-legs trickled up my spine.

 

My first time conducting an interview was a sweaty mess. I scrambled around McKinley's campus and ended up finding my source at a portable classroom that I saw every day but had never stepped on before. My social anxiety almost restrained me from knocking on the door but my lingering ambition led me to have a conversation with a gentle soul who had a genuinely wholesome motive for teaching special education.

 

A couple of months later, I was tasked to do a second interview, with a new vice principal at McKinley. I had talked to the principal with my class before my second one-on-one interview, so a vice principal shouldn’t be too hard. However, another staff reporter commented how the vice-principal was “scary,” resulting in an image of a shady giant popping up in my nimble mind. Despite the stereotype, I braced myself and interviewed a giant as gregarious as Hagrid from the Harry Potter series. By this time, I was a little more experienced with conversation-making, which is what interviews are all about, but I stuck to a formulaic interview where I stuck to a stilted list of questions instead of improvising questions.

 

In the second and third quarters of that first year, I continued to write articles and work with a group of reporters as I was promoted to a head reporter for being diligent in meeting deadlines. I also helped my editors design the third quarterly newspaper which was when I first learned about the InDesign program and developed my design skills.

 

The pandemic struck before quarter four and we went to remote learning. I had joined Newswriting with certain goals in mind but quarter four brought new goals: to do more than what is expected, to do extra work more than just for a grade, and to ensure that the tradition of having a quarterly newspaper does not die just like the traditions of the McKinley band and orchestra program. I diligently worked on the newspaper and sent revised InDesign files to my advisor in which she provided feedback or suggestions that I always use to make changes because I wanted to make a quality product.

 

After my freshman year, I did not take Newswriting any more because I had other requirements and experiences to fill my schedule, especially band. However, I continued to work alongside The Pinion’s advisor by being a part of McKinley’s literary magazine with whom the advisor was newly appointed due to the previous advisor stepping off the throne. With more work on her plate, my advisor continued to exemplify her skills to make the magazine a success just as she had done with the student newspaper over her years of teaching.

 

When I grew more comfortable amongst my fellow staff reporters and the social requirements of journalism, I realized that in middle school, although I was apprehensive at first, I ultimately made the right choice to nudge me on my journey to become a better writer and, most importantly, break out of my comfort zone. In fact, my fellow staffers voted me Most Valuable Staffer that year.

 

That is when I understood: I am not a loner who thrives in isolation — I am a human who is down-to-earth. I am An Vo — a student journalist — an introvert who strives to thrive in an extroverted world, one ambition at a time.