The courage to center “me”

The other day a journalist and friend I admire wrote about a brave decision of hers: She abandoned her search for full-time employment to invest her energy and time on a passion project. This isn’t just any passion project. It’s an organization she founded to fund and support news coverage by local media outlets serving immigrant communities. This journalist and friend is an immigrant like me. She’s a mother like me. We both embrace a similar approach to our work: Stay focused, get it done, prioritize the results and don’t brag (because the work speaks for itself). She talked about her decision to focus on the organization she founded as an investment in herself; in a LinkedIn post, she described her commitment to shaping the organization as “a place that will also embrace me and my family life, nurture me and compensate me.” 

“There’s a lot of ME in there,” she added, “so much so that it makes me uncomfortable to even say it.”

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Confronting our discomfort is an act of courage. Focusing on the self is an act of courage. It’s also something we should all talk about and demand of the places where we work. I still remember the pressure to deliver as a reporter after I came back from maternity leave, the weight of some unspoken requirement to prioritize the story over everything else, including my own child. I still remember one evening 14 years ago when I ran the eight blocks that separated the Roosevelt Avenue subway station in Jackson Heights, Queens, and the apartment I lived in, hoping I’d get there in time to catch my daughter before she fell asleep. (I didn’t make it.) I still remember leaving her under her father’s care and going on work trips that took me away for days and left me so drained that I had very little to give her when I got back.

My daughter is now 16. Her father has been gone for eight years and five months. Her memories are mostly of a family of two, her and me. I have no one else to leave her with when I travel for work, which isn’t as often as I used to, but it still happens — and I still feel guilty. What has changed is that since becoming a single parent, I’ve gotten better at talking back to the voice that tells me I should do more. I know I’m doing the best I can. And this is one of the lessons that Death has taught me: to cheer myself up, and to push myself, and to forgive myself if the push didn’t get me where I hoped to get. Because there’s always another chance. There’s always tomorrow.

With love and purpose always,

Fernanda