The pretend journalist
Journal entry
Before we start, this is my thinking from start to finish. I can’t imagine why anyone might find this interesting enough to read from start to finish but here I am, documenting it, nonetheless
Today, I begin a series where I will write a new post every weekday. I think here is a good place to start, with a journal entry, sharing my thoughts, intentions and goals for doing this.
Background
I have now been unemployed for three odd months. On the one hand, it’s been quite nice to come down from the pressure and anxiety of my last job. On the other hand, it’s quite a difficult feeling not being able to make a living. This is especially challenging because I am at a point in life where being able to provide for myself sufficiently is really important to me.
On Tuesday last week, I woke up at about 9 am and laid around my room scrolling through social media for one hour. When I was done, I had a shower and made breakfast. It wasn’t until noon before I was ready to start being productive, at which point I opened my copy of the new Hunger Games book and spent the rest of the day reading it. At the end of the day, I found myself thinking very intentionally about how I had spent my time. This is not the type of day people with jobs have. People don’t spend their Tuesdays reading novels they enjoy. In fact, many working people don’t spend any type of day doing this.
I have been thinking very intentionally about working and having a job for the past couple of months. At the point of quitting my job, one of the things I had on my mind was an intention to exponentially increase my salary. I wanted to earn more money than I was at the time; so much more that I didn’t think I could do it in that same position. So I quit. But quitting was weird because coming out of that job, I was a completely different person from who I was when I went in. Before my last job (as a researcher) my bio described me as a Writer, Web Designer and AI Engineer. Coming out, my bio describes me as a Writer, Researcher and Producer.
As a web designer and computer engineer, I felt more equipped to earn a living. I knew what jobs to apply for and what expertise I had to apply to them. I knew so, so and so about designing and building for the web. I had a university education in engineering which had exposed me to a lot of mathematics and software engineering, a fair bit of which I had a good grasp on. Before my last job, my main pastimes were web development, computational linguistics, machine learning and of course writing. The months leading to my last job, I had just finished building what was at the time my most complicated portfolio website; I had just submitted a paper to be published in an academic journal about my final year project on building a Yoruba chatbot; I had spent a week doing data collection on Nigerian languages with a small team from Google; I was learning a new frontend framework; for all intents and purposes, I was gathering expertise in tech. At the time, I did do a fair bit of writing, I always have. I had just started writing a publication where I turned hours of reading on subjects that interested me into conversational articles. This was the majority of research I was doing at the time and this is what got me my job as a Researcher. The job was perfect for me at the time. It was an environment where I would be working with familiar faces on an interesting project and would still be able to work on my personal interests. This was my NYSC year, it was exactly the kind of project I wanted to work on for my service year. Taking the job was a great choice, I just didn’t expect to leave it as such a different person.
Research
I started a blog I called the ‘The Original Impostor.’ It got this name because of my constant feeling of impostor syndrome. My intention with the publication was to write on subjects that I was otherwise not an expert at but had great interests in. Many of the original articles on road rage, the origin of slangs and climate change were written because of my curiosity about a subject. Essentially I was making definitive arguments or explanation on topics other people dedicated their entire lives to becoming experts in. This is often what I want to do when I research a topic. I really like learning things and on top of that, I really like sharing what I have learnt. I think having a rich body of knowledge equips our understanding of the world around us. I think this is one of the biggest gifts of literature, being able to influence thought and improving people’s understanding of the world around them.
After a few months, my writing on the blog changed from learning and sharing to learning and attempting to influence thoughts. The climate change article marked the beginning of this shift even though I did not realise it at the time. I remember sitting in the airport and coffee shops and many corners of my room working on this article but never with the intention to simply unload numbers and facts on people. I had consumed hours of arguments against the existence of climate change and many more in support, I read articles on the mechanics of climate change, I was listening to a podcast on what we could do about global warming, I was consuming a lot of content on the subject but when I decided to write, I didn’t want to say what everyone already knew. I wanted to address a narrative. When change becomes scary was the beginning of my attempt at writing to influence thought. What has come since then has been articles on quality, the power of obsession, a personal essay on making choices in the present. Every single one of these articles had something that my earliest articles did not have. Between research and writing, I was now including critical thought. Attempting to contribute to the discussion on certain topics. This came closer to the end of my job by which point I had spent less time actually doing this type of writing.
Identity
One of my biggest troubles this year with job finding has been identity. I tweeted a few days ago that I did not think I had any employable skills.
I feel this way because as a developer, I knew exactly what expertise I was offering to people. I knew this and this and this. As a research or a writer, this knowledge of tangible expertise has been harder for me to see in myself. Even as a podcast producer where there’s a certain technical skill I have, it’s been hard to market them and adequately feel valued for it. I haven’t applied for too many jobs for two reasons
- I haven’t been able to identify what positions interest me.
Like what jobs would I even apply for, what am I qualified to do? I have applied to work as a podcast producer in a few places (all foreign) and in each case, I have known that it was a long stretch. I applied to an opening as a happiness engineer but that was primarily because I felt it offered a similar opportunity as my last job. Doing a job I was capable of while having the opportunity to work on personal interests. I have looked at applying to creative direction jobs knowing that I was not qualified for them. The main issue is that I am either not qualified enough or I don’t know what I am qualified for.
2. I don’t want to work in a low-income environment anymore.
When I left my last job, I made the mental commitment to not take any job that paid less than 250,000 naira/ 650 dollars. This is more than double my last income. It might feel like a small amount to some people or a big one to others. In reality, It is just an arbitrary number to help me assign some value to my time.
Creative work- In all the time I have spent thinking about work in the past three months of unemployment, I have arrived at a theory for why I (and I think anyone) wants to work. Wants to be employed that is. Many of us see work as an opportunity to earn a living so we can do the things we enjoy. Work is a means to an end — money. Having money gives us room to do other things. A lot of people run the risk of falling into a system where they work to work some more. Where there’s no real purpose to why they work apart from it’s simply what they are doing. You work here today and when you don’t work, you don’t feel like you have any real purpose. I think of how I haven’t worked for the past three months, I haven't felt purposeless and apart from wanting to make a living, I haven’t found myself longing for a job. I have spent the past three months reading, learning, writing and telling audio stories. I have enjoyed doing creative work. I hoped to be able to make a living from doing this type of work. I have recently realised, I can’t. I can’t make that type of living right now. If there’s any depression I get right now it’s from this. There is no job title here saying, ‘you can tell stories, we want to pay you a sufficient amount to do this.’ There’s even the fact that I don’t yet make the quality of audio stories I want to make but I am quickly getting better and quickly doing that through my own motivation. But I am not making a living and I really want to.
Making a living- How can I do this? I have been thinking to myself. What skill can I do this through? I have been using the producer tag of my bio more often lately. Apart from my own, I have contributed to the production of 4 other podcasts this year (in 3 months). Some of the production I did as a showrunner, some as a consultant, some as an audio engineer, none ever paying well enough to sustain a livelihood. I think what I have been hoping for is the opportunity to apply a skill I have to work and make enough money to pay rent and take care of my family and friends and maybe travel. The obvious skill would be to go back to tech, to spark up the old computer scientist in me, to make stuff for the web. And I do love tech, I do love doing that stuff but It’s very consuming. I never felt like I could work on other things as a tech person. I always worked long hours, then worked some more at night then worked a lot more. And I didn't hate the work, I hated that I couldn't tell stories because of all the work. I don’t want to do that. I have been looking at the writer/researcher part of my bio, looking at it waste away. This is where I think perhaps I can earn myself a living. Through writing and research but I don’t know how to.
Writer/ Researcher
The republic is an African led magazine. Serious journalism from an African Worldview.
They are the first magazine I have made paid subscription to. They are a big motivation to my inspiration to write this series.
There a few different things writing can do. Take my attempts to foray into freelance writing for instance. I first attempted to write fiction for a living. This has proven to be very difficult. I have been unable to finish a book and all my short story submissions have been met with rejections. The next outlet and I think the most popular outlet for writing as a skill is marketing. Lots of freelance writers do writing that serves products. The writing itself isn’t the product. I guess I have always thought of my writing as a product itself. OR maybe simply hoped I could write as a product. Like when you write a story, the point of the story is the story itself. Towards the end of last year, my friend Benahili Ojeme worked me through what she knew about freelance writing for B2B marketing. She’s much better at it than I am. She held my hands till I was writing articles that companies might want me to write but this has never quite felt like writing I would enjoy. The type of writing I enjoy is the kind of writing I read in magazines like The republic. Journalism. In a conversation I had with someone recently, I described myself as a pretend journalist. For my podcast, I do a brand of journalism that involves telling intimate stories about humans. I like this type of writing. I like the type of writing I did on The Original Impostor. I like this writing that is its own product. I like this writing that influences thought. I like this type of writing that enriches people’s worldview. This I can do for a living.
The purpose of this series (finally)
Recently, I saw a job opening at The republic. I always click on their job openings. Another place I also click their job openings is Zikokomag. These are places that do the top two things I want to do as a storyteller, as a writer. Zikoko tells stories about people, which is what I do at the moment as a pretend journalist. The Republic publishes highly impactful essays on climate change, culture and a list of other topics. When I look at the job descriptions and requirements The Republic lists out, I always feel so unqualified to ever do that type of writing or editing. Just look at the credentials of their staff. I was thinking the other day that The republic would be such a good place for me to learn. So I made the mental commitment to cold email them to intern. Leading off that, I want to improve myself as a writer and researcher. In doing this, I want to read one article/essay a day and then write an article/essay in response to it. I consider that this might be a good exercise to improve my critical thought process and put me on my way to being a better journalist. That’s what this pretend journalist series is about. A series on me trying to be better at writing, as research, at journalism. When I get to 100 days, I will send that cold email.
I hope that this exercise will improve the clarity which I write, how I understand and break down complex ideas/arguments, and finally help me construct good arguments of my own.
That’s what this is. New articles every weekday.
P.S: I wrote this in one day on April 1sr 2021 but will continue editing it from time to time to improve the clarity here. This is a rough draft to get me started on the series.
