All In The Family (Except Me)
The summer after my sophomore year of college, I took my first real writing job: as a reporter for the school newspaper. I was paid $150 a month to cover campus and community happenings, traversing the little college town on my bicycle with a pen and notebook in hand.
It didn’t pay much, but it was good experience and good work. I was covering stories the regional news often ignored and keeping the student body informed. My coworkers were similarly dedicated to our noble mission.
I remember being in awe of the editor-in-chief and her managing editor. They were seniors and seasoned college journalists at this point. The newsroom was a wondrous place of knowledge, energy and journalistic camaraderie. I laughed nervously at the inside jokes that cropped up in our weekly staff meetings, knowing that at last I had found my home on campus, and soon I would be coining my own inside jokes with my peers.
I was about a year in when I started to get a sinking feeling when entering the newsroom. The team of editors admired my work — but I still wasn’t one of them. Their jokes were still unfamiliar to me, and they spoke of how much fun they’d had at So-And-So’s house last weekend, and did you see that photo we took the other day? You won’t believe what What’s-His-Name said!
I was working hard, writing interesting stories, winning praise for my interviews, and yet I wasn’t one of the team. It didn’t help that when I was home alone on a Saturday night, I’d pull out my phone to see Instagram photos of the staff hanging together, captioned, “Love my #newspaperfamily.”
That sinking feeling was growing inside me to an all-consuming jealous ache. I’d scroll through group selfie after group selfie as the hot-cold wave of jealousy washed over my body. My skin prickled. My stomach gnawed at itself. My throat constricted to hold back the tears. And just when the jealousy felt like it was too much to bear, it turned into a hot flood of anger. Why wasn’t I part of the family? Wasn’t I good enough? Who wanted to be friends with them anyway?
But every weekly meeting felt like a slap in the face. I’d enter the newsroom each Sunday afternoon to find them gathered around the work table in the center of the room, laughing and joking and excluding me from their club.
Two years after I graduated college, I told my father about this, and he called it “The Temptation of the Inner Circle.” He’s a pastor, so a lot of the phrases he coins use biblical terms (though he says he stole this particular phrase from C.S. Lewis).
My dad told me he felt that same jealousy when he heard about all the dinner parties his coworker was attending. Everyone, my dad says, wants to get closer and closer to that center of the group — the inner circle. As pastor of a church, he is as close to the center of a group as you can get, he told me, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to jealousy.
Writing this now, I realize that I was not alone in that room with the inner circle. It was not just them versus me. As I walk back through that office in memory, I can see a few freelancers huddled by the advertising computers on the fringe of the editorial space. Near them, working quietly at her desk, is the news editor; I liked her, but some of the other staff would trash-talk her when she wasn’t around. A couple of younger journalism students, here for class credit, pepper the room.
It doesn’t lessen the sting of jealousy to see their faces now, but it does help a little with that feeling of isolation.
I quit that job halfway through my senior year, partly because of the unbearable cliquishness of it all and partly because I decided being a hard news reporter wasn’t really my jam.
I worked to cultivate my own circle of friends. Sometimes, I see photos of them on Instagram, hanging out without me. None of us is immune to the Temptation of the Inner Circle. When that jealous feeling starts creeping up from the pit of my stomach and clawing at my throat, I remind myself that I am loved. Maybe I missed this weekend’s party, but I was invited to the one before that. And I, too, can invite people to spend time with me.
There are people in my life who want to by my friend.
And those who don’t — well, they’re old news.
