Sleepless nights and pivotal moments

And here it is again, another sleepless night and my last at The Pitt News. These feelings are all too familiar: the dryness of my eyes, the vague throbbing in my head, the pain in my neck.

Probably the biggest lie I’ve told myself over the past three and a half years is a recurring one: I’ll go to bed at a reasonable hour. Instead, I just became really good at functioning on five or six hours of sleep every night. Even on the nights I couldn’t get home from the office until 2 a.m. and knew I had to be awake for class at 9 a.m., I couldn’t force myself to go to bed.

Instead, I’d sit in my standard-issue Pitt chair at my standard-issue Pitt desk and read essays or write long emails or scribble notes about future plans. I’d use the time to think, reflect on the day, plan the next day and decompress. Occasionally, I’d lose track of time until the clock confronted me — 4:30 a.m. — reminding me tomorrow was already happening.  

Sleepless nights, if taken as a whole, have defined my time at Pitt. When I think back over the moments that have helped shape myself and my future, they always took place in the dark. I can almost never remember the sun. It’s always those twilight hours, between bedtime and sunrise, that have molded my worldview, sharpened my dreams and helped me figure out who I am and who I want to be. I owe my life to those nights. As a now-22-year-old and soon to be graduate, I suspect I am not alone.

My first semester, when Lorde’s album came out, I was taking my first journalism class. I was writing my first piece of longform nonfiction, a braided essay about growing up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. “Pure Heroine” was on repeat, either in my earbuds or out loud from my phone. My weeknights, one after another, were spent dreaming, as Lorde did in every song. I had escaped my small central Pennsylvania town — the world was wide open.

But that also terrified me. I had a panic attack when my friends started talking about signing a lease for an apartment. I was thrilled to be on my own but hadn’t realized I wasn’t ready for the realities of the world. Laying in my Tower C bed each night, my mind spun constantly, oscillating between elation at the possibilities of the future and fear of everything I didn’t know.

Was nursing the right major for me? (It wasn’t). How could I prove myself as a writer? How hard did I have to work? How do I leave a legacy? When am I going to die? How am I going to die? I didn’t sleep much that semester.

I dropped my nursing major after my first year here and threw myself into journalism, a decision made largely over the course of my sleepless nights. It was the career I had wanted from the start but didn’t talk about because I didn’t think I’d be able to get a job. With that fear still nipping at my heels and knowing I needed to prove to myself I’d made the right decision, I poured myself into The Pitt News, writing as much as I physically could. At night, after I’d filed a story, I’d sit up at my dorm room desk, this time in Lothrop Hall, and think: Was I working hard enough? How could I get better? Was I on the right path? Was any of this work going to pay off? My head would spin, and my nights were dreamless.

Once I became an editor at The Pitt News, the office and its demands kept me from sleeping, even when I desperately wanted to. Twelve and 14-hour shifts became normal. I was the News Editor during the fall of my junior year, and one night, we had sent the paper to the printers just before the 1 a.m. deadline when our Social Media Editor told me that someone had just robbed her friend. No one was hurt, thankfully, but I’d have to write about it.

After checking in with the 911 dispatcher to confirm that the police had visited the house, I headed down to the student’s home and knocked on the door. Standing on their front porch, I listened to the four roommates describe how a man with a gun entered through the unlocked front door, forced the one student who was home into the basement and blocked the door as he stole watches and laptops.

As the students processed their fear, and as I thought about how to best tell their story, I realized none of us were sleeping much that night. But if my story could make other students aware of the crime in their neighborhood and help protect them, then it was worth it. It was a small incident, but it reminded me why I wanted to be a journalist. The sleepless moments, I’ve found, have taught me the most.

My sleepless nights aren’t what many people call crazy college stories — they’re not fun or wild. Much of my time at Pitt hasn’t been fun, let alone wild. I’ve laid awake many nights wondering if I should have ever gone to college. I was close to joining the military out of high school, going as far as taking the the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test and talking to a recruiter about which branch I could join and what I could specialize in.

I was equally close to moving to Pittsburgh and working as a waiter. After I didn’t pass some of my nursing classes, I had to grapple with leaving Pitt, switching my major or staying in school for a fifth year to catch up on the nursing curriculum.

Before I moved into Tower C my first year here, someone told me I was about to live the best four years of my life. Nothing could have been less true. After I dropped nursing and decided on journalism, I could feel the weight of the decision constantly lurking over me. I was moving into a profession that demanded expertise and experience and little to no job prospects once I graduated. I was constantly working, chasing a dream that seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer with every step I took toward it.

At this point, I’ve grabbed hold of a tiny sliver of that dream. Even as newspapers around the country lay off reporters, I’ve slid into a job as an investigative reporter for a local news site. But this moment has come with strife, fear, anxiety, soul-searching and countless sleepless nights.

I’ve learned most of what I know about myself after the sunset, and I know I wouldn’t be who I am without nights that robbed me of a full night’s rest. The long nights probably won’t end once I graduate in a week, but I’m looking forward to what those nights will bring.