I’ve been, more or less, on a journey of self-discovery and self-improvement over the past year after hitting rock bottom. My journey has included psilocybin that alleviated addiction and much of my anxiety — and allowed the further work I’d been needing to do for well over a decade. By the end of April, I felt like I was vaguely aware of what I wanted to do and ready to engage, but lacking any sense of how to find “it.”

A week later, I posted on Reddit about a local sale on rice and beans that got the most upvotes of anything I’d ever posted there. What came into specific relief was there was still a market for “news you can use” that I know how to help (I’m not wont to take screenshots of ads, but it was 5 pounds of food for like $3.66 in a subreddit where food insecurity was a frequent topic and no one looks at the circular anymore); no improvement on the “how.” I toyed with the idea of (and bought a domain for) a cooperative of experienced journalists operating under “staff” bylines covering just the news scaling from city to city by word of mouth as direct (i.e., Patreon) subscriptions grow to cover an additional living wage position. Not being at all knowledgeable about grants for seed funding, I reached out to a former colleague who’s been in the VC space for a bit now who confirmed there was a “there” there but was of course not connected to that world.

A project review at work kept getting pushed back on automation I’d done and had been maintaining for a few months in the vain hope that this would unlock more money and automation opportunities (there are none). The rumblings about Reddit started, and I decided if I was learning about an alternative on Reddit (which is 100% what Lemmy as a whole was being sold as in very early June), I was already behind the curve. Someone suggested Beehaw, so I looked around, thought “this looks nice,” and signed up. I was days away from uninstalling Discord … the servers I was active on are long gone, and it was down to my college roommate, who also talks to me on Steam, thus: no use case. Still, I did miss the “good old days” of Discord and figured it couldn’t hurt to have people to talk to while maintaining feed sanity.

So I responded to news links posted there and ended up getting in discussions with admins (mostly @Alyaza) about my “take” on news, though I’d not really been paying attention to community operations to that point. I really liked what I heard, and it felt like I was in agreement with the admins on overall goals for news.

From the other side, it might be tempting to think that what happens next is I immediately notice they are looking for U.S. News moderators and apply.

At the risk of coming off as contratrian: Au contraire.

And I do want to stop here, because this is a moment I have now had three times in my life … that I know of. When you’ve actually been honest with yourself about your next goal and take that first step that in hindsight seems so tiny as to be forgotten if it had led anywhere else, consigned to the ether where faded memories become incoherent, there is an inflection point. It has been, for me, a time when I have to make what seems to me like a minor faux pas under ordinary circumstances, but in that moment seems like the only thing any reasonable person could do.

And why does it seem like a faux pas? Self-doubt. What others consider “normal,” I often consider pushy. So inserting yourself into a conversation or asking a stranger for a favour is something ordinary people do daily. I do not. I like to be in the background, being snide and efficient — hence the copy desk.

So I’m poking around the channels on Discord and happen upon #governance (I think for the first time), where it has just been explained to someone else that mod responsibilities take marginally more time than just being an all-day user.

Here’s the lightbulb. It’s literally being handed to me. It is on the screen exactly then, I am here, and U.S. News starts tomorrow. If I cannot take this as the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to get people’s expectation of news back to “boring shit people need to know + disasters,” this is exactly where I start to share the blame for my life not moving forward.

In fact, I wasn’t really expecting to get the green light to go all the way there (aim high for your starting point, right?), had no manifesto primed and only first heard confirmation I’d been chosen just after the community was created. This was a classic Powderhorn, thrown together in 45 minutes after getting off the bus.

A single point of contention led to an edit the admins were cool with, and a wildly different U.S. News sprung forth than most of the community would have expected, with the explicit goal that a focused U.S. News vision would further Beehaw’s reputation for setting the bar a bit higher. Besides, so much stuff belongs elsewhere (I’ve yet to outright reject a story, though I’ve nixed a source) that it’s honestly going to probably end up being disproportionately policy wonks of a particular stripe, since the activism is also elsewhere.

Nonetheless, that’s a community not addressed as a group anywhere else on Beehaw, however minuscule it may be. And for everyone else? U.S. News does what it says on the tin.

I have achieved my overall goal of being able to start in some small manner steering the discussion of news back to actual news. Beehaw seems happy with an experienced journalist modding the domestic news section. So far, I’ve heard no complaints about the format from users, although one response did make my eyes moisten a little.

This opened up the separation of work and accomplishment, which is at once obvious and baffling. I mean, I was a newspaper editor. I got both in eight hours; didn’t everyone? Reality has been cruel.

After years of being able to predict the entire day outside of work bullshit with exceptions of short bursts, things are about to become unpredictable again. But when my life is rearranged, I should feel the most free since I was in college, curious about the future instead of dreading what’s to come.

Would you believe that when I sat down to write this, I expected it to be half the length and have covered all three inflection points?

Anyway, point being, when you really know what you want and take a first step down that path, as cheesy as it sounds, things start falling into place. Not in the “pay off your debt and dream in a few years” way; you’ve announced your intent, and the universe works in mysterious ways. So it’s time to be ready to let all the work you’ve done to get here pay off.

All you have to do is ask.

And it’ll be taken as the most natural thing ever.

As to avoid upsetting sticklers for Chekov’s gun:

First time was in the newsroom in college. I’d written a news story as a contributing writer, and the news editor was out at lunch. I was instead edited by the editor in chief; all I remember of that was the phone call just as we’d finished, which I could hear his end of while walking out of his office “… yes, we are looking for designers.” Pretty sure it was eight days later that I woke up in the design editor’s bed.

Second time, well … a lot of things had to line up exactly as they did, including losing my virginity to the woman I did in college and a freak ice storm where That Doesn’t Happen. And that’s how I met my second ex-wife.