INSERT COLUMN NAME HERE
I came to journalism in an abnormal way; I am not a traditional, go-to-college kind of guy. Instead, I started my adult life by going to cosmetology school.
I graduated in 2019 and started in my first salon in the middle of January 2020. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic happened. We were all in quarantine, baking, learning instruments or doing anything that you could do to occupy your time. For three months, I was stuck at home with not much to do, but devote time to my hobbies, including writing.
Back in middle school, my oldest best friend, Clare, and I had these stories where we wrote about the multitude of characters we created.
She is an amazing artist and I loved to write dramatic, angsty little stories about the characters. To this day, she is the number one supporter of my writing, my partner in crime (and story writing). While being stuck at home during a global pandemic with no income isn’t the highlight of my life, it did allow me to get back into writing.
I would write things off and on in the years after 2020, mostly stories about the characters that Clare and I came up with. It wasn’t until nearly halfway through 2024 that I realized that, maybe, I wanted to do something with my writing skills.
It was mid-June in 2024, and I was in Newport News, Virginia, visiting Clare. She works from home and I was up there for two weeks while her husband was on a business trip.
I brought my laptop with me to Virginia, presumably to watch movies or play video games. It wasn’t until one day, Clare and I were at a coffee shop while she worked and I was just listening to music and messing around on my computer to keep her company. That day, I had a crisis.
I seem to have these crises occasionally throughout my life, whether it be about my personal life or professional. In this case, I was having a work crisis. I love being a cosmetologist — doing color, cuts and transforming hair — but part of me has always wanted to do something different. At the time of the trip, I was just burnt out from doing hair, which led to my aforementioned crisis.
Clare was very patient with me and helped me walk through a list of things I wanted in a job. I wanted something reliable, yet exciting and flexible, but somewhat repetitive.
Then it hit me.
I wanted to be a journalist.
A journalist? But what about school? I didn’t go to school for journalism or anything similar.
Would I be able to make it as a reporter without all the schooling and preparation that college gives you?
So, I started a blog.
It’s a true crime blog, with most of the crimes based in the central Texas area and emphasis on forgotten, unsolved or not as well-known cases. I’ve always been fascinated by true crime and I thought I had found my outlet.
For about two days, my thirst to be a journalist was quenched.
Slowly, I started looking into classes again, thinking possibly of going back to Austin Community College to get even a rudimentary idea of what journalism looks like. I was unsatisfied with merely running a blog, I wanted to write to reach more people. My friend Clare, always so wise, suggested that I should just shoot my shot: reach out to some local newspapers back in Texas and see if any of them would take someone in as an intern, who wasn’t currently enrolled in journalism school.
And that’s how we got here. I will be forever grateful to Clare for pushing me and supporting me through my most recent crisis. I look forward to learning and growing as a writer, and opening a new chapter in my life.
Brown is an intern for the Hays Free Press and News-Dispatch. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
