I like to tell stories.

A friend once asked me if a story is still a story if no one ever tells it. That befuddled me—kind of like the whole “a tree falls in the woods but no one’s there to hear it” thing. After much pondering, I realized that, for stories, it’s telling them that makes the difference. The telling is what allows them to live, to breathe, to become something, to mean something. Without the telling, “stories” fade away; dwindle down to just a series of events, which occurred without significance. They seep back into the rivers of neurons that compose memories, and if they float the river long enough, if they float forever, without being fished out and shared, why, it’s almost like they never happened at all.

Journalism pulls them out of the river, all of them. Some are beautiful, happy, enriching, like pulling out a King Salmon, so breathtaking you feel inspired just looking at it; others are ugly, scary, sad, like yanking up a Blob fish most people would rather throw back than gaze at for more than a second. The point is that all types of stories deserve to be pulled out of the river and told.

Journalism informs. It educates. And that’s important because, from my perspective, there’s nothing scarier than an uninformed populace, a group of people who can’t make good decisions or think enriching thoughts because they’re ignorant about what’s going on in the world. As the written word shapes the individual, culture leaves its handprint on every monumental experience and trivial moment. I want to be a journalist in order to bring the world to people. Through writing, I hope to give voice to things that I believe need to be heard.

When I was little, maybe fourth grade, I entered an essay contest run by a local newspaper. The theme of the contest was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wrote an essay detailing my fervent desire to be a baker (this was after I’d moved past the inevitable fervent desires to be a veterinarian, a lawyer, and a pop star). As I wrote about my dreams of opening a bakery and making cookies for a living, I discovered I loved writing about baking much more than mixing cookie dough. It was at this point I knew I wanted to be a writer, a discovery that, unlike my fleeting dreams of a singing career, has stuck with me ever since.

I love creative writing, disappearing from the world everyone else sees into a world all my own, a magical place as seen through my eyes. But I love journalism for almost the opposite reason: it provides the ability to see this real world on a deeper level and serves as a platform for expressing the truth. It is the fishing pole in the river of society. It fishes out the stories that need told. It makes change. It makes life.