#j school

can i let go of perfect and settle for enough? 

and instead of holding my breath waiting for condemnation or validation, can i just validate my own damn self? 

In my community engagement class at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, we’re using a tool called Hearken that allows people to submit questions about the communities we’re covering and then allow our audience to vote on which story they’d like us to investigate. It’s the ideology rather than the tool that I find particularly striking (because there are other newsrooms that do the same thing but with Google forms, for example) because reporting is done WITH people rather than ON them.  

 The story that I just handed in was about the ways straight edge (people who don’t do drugs, alcohol, eat fast food etc.) and recovering addicts in the underground music scene. The person who asked me to cover this particular story is a touring musician from Australia who has witnessed 3 heroine overdoses while on stage. She was able to recognize the signs and save them with a kit she kept in their merch box. Now, she wants to train bands to do the same. 

I interviewed two recovering addicts in the scene and one straight edge guy in a band (who I knew from high school and now plays guitar in the Acacia Strain believe it or not!) There’s a lot of commonalities and goals within these two different worlds inside the scene. Music is a great unifier and often times, there are users that will even look out for those in recovery rather than pressure them. 

One of the people in recovery was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and 70 bands came together for a completely DIY festival where all proceeds went to paying his medical bills for chemo. Before that, he was stealing and involved in robberies. He withdrew cold turkey in jail and found out about the scene from a friend he made at a halfway house. These stories are so incredible. I held in a good cry for 2 days until I burst into tears retelling it to a friend. 

 lmfao these researchers are understating things