Alex Jacobi: Struggle is more than real

Saying goodbye is something I’ve never been good at.

I can’t even handle simple goodbyes. When I was a kid, I played out dramatic scenes in my head over simple things leaving my life, like when my mom decided to get a new car or when we moved to a house in another part of town.

So that makes this time in my life very difficult, seeing as I am not only graduating, but I am moving to Columbia, Mo., to attend graduate school for journalism at University of Missouri, which is five and a half hours away.

But I think the hardest part isn’t doing something new, it’s leaving this behind. You see, The Pacer became my makeshift home in the middle of chaos. And now I have to close the door to the office and never walk back.

I walked into The Pacer as a freshman guest writer with big dreams and a timid heart. I looked at it as a possibility for leadership one day, but I wasn’t sure how capable I was of leading a publication. Then, at the end of my sophomore year of college, my long-term boyfriend and I broke up, and through one of the most tragic times of my life, I found the most joyful time of my life, being an editor of The Pacer. What’s crazy is, I don’t even regret having my heart broken by one of the loves of my life now, because it led me to the beginning of my destiny. By losing everything from my hometown, besides my family, I was able to invest all of me in the exact thing that I needed to, this newspaper. And what a journey it has been.

The journey of journalism began even before my freshman year of college. I began as a 15-year-old in high school, terrified and insecure. I made it into the journalism class at my high school only because a student dropped the class. A girl in the class came up to me in the hallway and said, “Alex, did you hear? So-and-so dropped and you made it into journalism!” I remember thinking, “Well, I guess I’ll try this thing out.”

That thing turned into my life’s purpose and my college major. And now, I’m moving on from being Executive Editor of The Pacer to being a graduate student at University of Missouri. If you would have told me at 15 that I would be here, I would have probably not believed you. Yet, here I am. And once again, I’m finding myself saying about grad school, “Well, I guess I’ll try this thing out.”

But, even though I am graduating 10 days from this publication date and leaping into the unknown, I still choose to live in the present. I refuse to set a countdown calendar on my phone till graduation or to say that I wish the days would move faster. I know better than to wish time away, because whether you want it to or not, it moves rather quickly and one day you find yourself wanting to give anything to even have a split second of that time back.

The truth is, my time at The Pacer, while it has brought me through some hellish experiences, it has been a dream come true and a blessing. Never have I felt so in line with my purpose. When I make a newspaper, my worries melt away and purpose oozes from my fingertips. I can’t even explain how therapeutic creating a newspaper is to me. It’s like the artist at his canvas or the musician at the piano.

When I enter the Pacer office, I’m home. My adviser, Ms. Tomi, recently told me, “Home is wherever you make it.” And somewhere along the way, this kooky little office with terrible ventilation and hardly any air conditioning became my home. Even when I face the worst situations with The Pacer (and let me tell you, I’ve faced some bad ones) and I want to sob from the sheer stress of it all, I always come back here. Sometimes I just sit in silence and stare around the room, thinking of how much has changed, how proud I am of some of my editorial board members, how anything has the potential to become what we dream it to be, if only we have the motivation and hard work to make it happen. My editorial board and I took an okay newspaper and made it an award-winning one, for the first time in a decade. How many other undergraduates get an amazing experience like that?

Of course, not many other undergraduates are like the ones I’m around every day, so that’s probably why. I am confident that we are the hardest working people on this campus. You’ll see our cars line the parking lot at night, on holidays and as the sun is rising, operating within both normal business hours and late janitorial staff hours. You’ll see our car driving down the sidewalk on Wednesdays as we hand deliver all our newspapers. You’ll see fresh content on our website everyday, which is all produced by a staff of only 10 or so people in a given semester.

You see, not only is The Pacer award-winning, but so is the staff. That’s not something you’ll see in a press release or on a billboard, but let’s be honest, how much recognition actually goes to those who deserve it? As Ron Swanson said, “Awards are stupid, but they’d be less stupid if they went to the right people.” I’ve learned that living for awards proves futile, and when you don’t live for the awards, you’re actually able to enjoy them more when you get them.

All the awards and recognition aside, at the end of the day, I know I am blessed beyond measure. I know when the sun rises, I get to start over and be the best person and journalist I can be. That’s what matters. Not meeting this crazy world’s standards, but being a person you can live with and making beautiful things out of a world of dust. I can honestly say that with The Pacer, we’ve done just that.

So even though I suck at saying goodbye because I hold on to all good things in my life like a stubborn kid, I now am making a conscious effort to do just that.