A girl wearing a black hijab — a Palestinian girl — stares at me from her dorm room 1,000 miles away. She gives me a dry chuckle, her eyes scanning everywhere but the camera — searching.

Searching for words precise enough to share the feeling she doesn’t know how to do justice to.

She stutters, trying to begin her sentence.

I can feel her discomfort.

The discomfort of knowing how to respond. The discomfort of knowing how to react. The discomfort of knowing how to stand by your truth.

And her discomfort is a familiar feeling inside my body — a discomfort that made me hate journalism.

***

The first day back in class my junior year, our adviser tells us our publication is now under prior review.

Because of my story.

I’m not angry — or even frustrated — at first.

But confused. I don’t understand … What had I said wrong?

So, I do what a journalist does — I ask questions.

I find my principal, sit down with him outside the school library and say, I don’t understand what bothered you.

At first, he says I hadn’t included the administration’s perspective.

I explain my story was a student opinion piece and tell him about all the research I’d done for the past two months.

Then the conversation starts growing tense. He begins to lecture me on what a “real journalist” should report, how bias works, the danger of bias.

Soon, he’s yelling at me for being “a bad student journalist.”

Forty-five minutes later, I find myself in the bathroom stall, leaning against the tan tiles of the wall, closing my eyes, clutching the tiles, digging my nails into the grout to find stability because I’m hyperventilating so much.

I think I’m going to collapse.

That phrase “a bad student journalist” still haunts me more than I’d like to admit.

***

I start journalism with PBS News Student Reporting Labs’ (SRL) inaugural student advisory board in my freshman year before I ever take a high school journalism class.

Being on monthly Zoom meetings with the head editorial team of SRL, giving them advice and guiding their production, gives me confidence to go up to my former adviser and convince her to let me join our school’s first-ever newspaper — without the prerequisite.

Journalism starts to feel comfortable for me. But I still flinch whenever anyone calls me a journalist — a red flag I don’t recognize immediately.

Everyday, when I arrive in the newsroom, I ask questions. I dip my toes into photography, writing, broadcast, design, podcasting, social media. I go to workshops: attend TAJE’s Fall Fiesta three years in a row — my senior year, without my publication behind me — attend Gloria Shields twice — returning the summer before senior year alone, earning a scholarship to cover the fees — attend the University of North Texas’s Scripps Howard Fund Emerging Journalists Program, earning me a high school news internship at KERA, North Texas’s NPR station, the summer before my junior year.

I take every opportunity I can to soak anything and everything about journalism.

I report fearlessly, knowing my passion to report and write are from a good place — and knowing I am good at what I do.

Somewhere along the way, I start to recognize my words serve a purpose.

So I write an opinion piece. One arguing how our school district should provide menstrual products in our bathrooms.

So I run.

Run from the newsroom to the nurse’s office for an interview. Run from the nurse’s office to an assistant principal’s office for an interview. Run from the assistant principal’s office to my home to sit in my gray cushioned chair to join Zoom meetings with different menstrual organizations and advocates for interviews.

All my running is to have conversations.

And all those conversations prove to me why the story matters.

I finally understand what it means to be a “good journalist” — collect opportunities, internships and pursue impactful stories — and I’ll be successful.

But that meeting with my principal is when the self-doubt starts seeping in.

Am I really a bad student journalist? Am I that inconsiderate? Did my words do more harm than good?

Censorship begins my disgust toward being labeled a journalist.

My attitude towards journalism begins to change. Before I walk into my newsroom, I take a silent sigh, finding a blue plastic chair, popping my airpods, blast music and stare at the forest of redwood trees on the lock screen of the Mac in front of me. I avoid conversations of my staffers around me.

I can’t get myself to interact. I can’t get myself to write. I can’t get myself to do journalism.

I hate it — I hate journalism. I refuse to do it.

***

I sleepwalk throughout the rest of my junior year — I only write three stories. My only passion for journalism that year comes through New Voices Texas — it becomes the one place where I use my journalistic talents.

I send over 300 emails to advisers around the state. I connect the New Voices Texas team with Student Press Law Center to hold a webinar during Student Press Freedom Day. I speak at my school board meeting about how our district’s school-sponsored media policy is harmful for student journalists. I work with Shiftpress, an independent publication in Houston, to encourage them to cover us for lobby day.I write an opinion piece for Shiftpress on how the defunding of public media proves we need legislation to protect student journalist press rights.

But most importantly, I learn to listen.

I find an unexpected solace in hearing others share their own censorship stories, ones about being misrepresented, silenced and overpowered by institutions — institutions that claim to support narratives but refuse to respect them.

I realize these stories mirror my own.

In that recognition, I feel less alone.

My work with New Voices Texas drives me to begin reporting another piece for Shiftpress — a piece about how student journalists confront the reality of legacy media newsrooms having anti-Palestinian bias.

A story about how institutions we look up to as student journalists are letting us down.

But as I speak to student journalists across the country, the story becomes how, even though we continue to be let down, we should continue to believe in the power of words.

My censorship experience teaches me the unsaid of journalism: you will understand the purpose of journalism before the weight.

And I don’t understand that weight until I fear writing itself.

That weight is discomfort.

Continuing to record, report and write, not to answer but to invite conversation — to sit in discomfort along the people who trust me with their stories.

As I decide to dedicate my career to journalism, I choose knowing that career will hurt, resist and unsettle me — but being a seeker and documenter of truth should not be comforting.

My career decision is meant to keep me awake in the early morning hours, typing my questions and uncertainties into my Google Keep or blue notebook, frustrated and unsure, but still going — just as the girl wearing the black hijab continues to sit and search for words in silence.

In the silence, I continue to worry about my questions, my tone, whether I’m being careful enough with her narrative.

But I continue to sit — in the light of my orange LED lamp on my desk, the whirling of my laptop’s fan and the screams of my five-year-old brother echoing upstairs.

I let the girl wearing the black hijab stare at the wall and stutter.

Soon, the discomfort becomes comfortable.