I may not know much — I’m 22, barely have a degree in political science and have never left the country — but I do know this: the world is mean. 

The world is nasty, and it never slows down no matter how much you want it to. It just keeps going.

The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t slow or sleep either. It doesn’t pause for grief. It doesn’t care that you’re exhausted, or that your hands are shaking, or that you just want 15 minutes where no one is suffering somewhere you can’t reach.

The headlines keep coming; the alerts keep buzzing. And if you let it, reading the news feels less like the democratization of information and more like holding your face over sulfuric acid.

I know this because I feel it too. Every day. Every deadline.

There is a particular anguish in paying attention. To watching a city council vote go the wrong way, to reading about a policy that will hurt people you love, to realizing that the world is not broken in some dramatic, fixable way — but broken in a thousand small, grinding, ordinary ways that no single story can ever fully heal.

And yet I keep writing. I keep showing up with my notepad, I keep calling sources who don’t call back and attending meetings that run past their intention and I keep typing words I know might be swallowed by the algorithm before breakfast.

I do this not because I’m immune to the private perils of our own quiet lives, but because I believe with every bone in my body that keeping people informed and educated about the world is a gift. It isn’t a pleasant gift or a comfortable one. It’s a gift like fire — dangerous and unpredictable, but also the only thing that keeps the dark at bay.

I write because I believe that the purpose of life is to see the world. Not the world we wish existed, but this one. The real one. The one with the mean and the nasty and the news that never ends.

I write because the purpose of life is to see things dangerous coming to — to look toward the hard and broken places we’d rather ignore — and go there anyway. Look at the walls around you and ask who built them; ask what they’re keeping out. 

Find the answers to your questions and draw a light to it so that no one can pretend they didn’t know. So that they can no longer ignore. Draw closer, cross the room and sit beside someone whose life looks nothing like yours and say, “Tell me, I’m listening.”

I write because the purpose of life is to find each other. In a world designed to keep us separate, in a news cycle engineered to make us afraid of our neighbors, the simple act of telling a true story about another human being is an act of rebellion. It is the very act that says, “You are not alone, and I see you.”

I write because the purpose of life is to feel.

To feel anguish when you read about a family losing their home. To feel rage when you read about an injustice you cannot stop. To feel hope when you read about a community that refused to give up in their rage against the machine. To feel stirred, and shaken, and moved and changed.

That feeling — that raw, uncomfortable, inconvenient squirm in your skin — is the whole point. To feel is to be alive. It is to refuse the numbing, the scrolling, the easy escape into cynicism or apathy. It is to say everything matters because everyone matters.

I did not find this purpose in the never-ending knife fight that is politics, which asked me to lie my way to comfort. I did not find this purpose in the elitist club that is law, which asked me to perform my way into a social standing I did not want part in.

I found it in a newsroom with bad coffee, dying printers and a group of exhausted, idealistic students who refused to look away. I found it in the 3 a.m. stillness after a deadline, the world asleep, my byline staring back at me like a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep. I found it in the faces of the people I interviewed — the ones who had every reason to stop talking and talked anyway because they believed someone should know.

This is my last article as a student journalist, and I want to be clear about what I’m leaving behind. I’m not leaving behind a career; God knows I’ll continue to follow this North Star of mine. But I am leaving behind a way of being in the ecosystem at Oregon State and the commitments I’ve made here to looking and listening and refusing to pretend that the acid doesn’t burn.

Because it does burn. Every day.

But here’s what I’ve learned: The burn means you’re still here. The anguish means you still care. The exhaustion means you haven’t given up.

To the readers who have stayed with me: Thank you for feeling. Thank you for not looking away. Thank you for reading words that might have hurt or challenged you.

To the journalists who will take my place: The world is going to be mean. It will tug at every fiber of your being and leave you with nothing if you let it. And above all, you will be tired.

Write anyway.

Dive into the things that are dangerous, draw closer to the curiosities of life, find each other and feel everything. That is the gift. That is why I write.