I’ve spent at least half of every spring semester in high school grounded. Freshman year, it was just the first two, three months until I finally secured an A in English and regained my social privileges. I brushed it off as a fluke.
But sophomore year, it happened again. My incessant chatter in math class had resulted in me tanking every other test, and I was detained accordingly. I was able to throw myself into my work for about half of that semester but, once I was passing again, I grew increasingly restless. My conversations, both internal and external, had always been grounded in stories; this exchange of experiences is what kept me interested and interesting, I thought. But when your radius of movement shrinks down to your own home, a handful of Caltrain stops and the occasional grocery run, so does your story arsenal. You have to start hunting for those shareable tidbits instead of letting them come to you.
And so, I hunted. I would take my friends through my search for the perfect study candle in excruciating detail, obsessive scent research and all. I’d tell them the tale of a ghost ridiculously dubbed Ma Walker that was rumored to haunt our inn during a Model United Nations conference (and the signs that he was definitely real). I’d explain the Glenn Wolkenfeld biology musical playlist that I listened to like a subliminal and could rap by heart — then proceed to do so. It was surprisingly well-received, so I continued.
When the traditional grounding struck again junior year, I was ready, ditching my AirPods on train rides to allow myself to observe more freely. I kept a running list of all my ratings of the Caltrain stations, judged based on aesthetics and accessibility for pedestrians with dismal navigational skills. I mused with my friends about how many faces, on average, seem completely new to them — a prompt I started wondering about after I had stepped into this random literature workshop where every other person felt eerily familiar. I began constantly churning out little amalgamations of these inputs, gathering tiny moments until they became tellable. I felt like a dry sponge whenever I went outside, eager to absorb anything I could just to see what the result would be when I squeezed everything out again.
When I first started this micro-experience collection, I saw it as a method of overcompensating for a boring life — using borderline theatrical intonation and gestures to cover up the fact I really wasn’t doing anything. And that was true, to an extent; the physical act of storytelling was more of a performance than anything. But behind each story that required these hyperacute details to even remotely have substance, I was inadvertently training myself as a journalist, in trying to find the story in everything. Half of journalism, I realized when I became an editor, didn’t come from the writing itself.
It comes from the pitch before. And pitching requires noticing — noticing when a one-off complaint becomes a recurring pattern, noticing how many people have something to say about a given topic, noticing how all those seemingly trivial details can add up to something bigger.
Stories rarely scream; they whisper — whispers that really only come out when you’re comfortable sitting with the silence for a while. And when you’re grounded, you finally stay put long enough to hear them.
Emma Shen is a senior at Aragon High School in San Mateo. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.
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