Terribly Happy

1995

I got a call a few days ago from a student reporter at OU’s Oklahoma Daily newspaper. I don’t ever turn down those interviews; I worked there for four years in college and I’ll always credit the paper with giving me my career start. The interviews never take very long (student reporters, for whatever reason, have three-to-four questions and that’s always it; never more, never a longer conversation than that), and they’re always cordial and flattering.

I’ve become accustomed to getting that call before landmark anniversaries of April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. At five years, 10 years, 15, I’m pretty sure I did an identical interview about what it was like to be a student reporter in the middle of such a giant story. But the questions are less urgent now, especially the ones about not having had Internet at the time. It seems like ancient history now, a world without a live feed for everyone, and maybe it is.

The second or third question in the interview started with, “Most of our students either weren’t born yet in 1995 or were only a year or two old” and that stopped me cold. Yes. Of course. That makes total sense. This was 20 years ago. These students are 18, 19, 20, 21. They weren’t here or they weren’t aware of it as it was happening. Total sense, but it blindsided me anyway. We’ve hit that point, have we?

April 19, 1995 was only two weeks after my 20th birthday. The 20th anniversary, on Sunday, was two weeks after my 40th and the bombing itself is now right at the midpoint of my life. It’s a marker in so many ways, of change and sudden, unwanted maturation and of how little I knew that I had to learn very quickly.

And I’ve mostly been avoiding that marker for a lot of years, mostly out of guilt. Not survivor’s guilt; I was not close enough to the tragedy to claim it as anything close to my own. But something like reporter’s guilt. The sense that once the stories were published, this was no longer my story to tell or share anymore. The story belonged to the families and to the reporters who stayed in Oklahoma and continued covering the trials and memorials and anniversaries.

It belonged to people like my friend Carla Wade, who is both a television reporter and someone who lost her father in the bombing and has written poignantly about the ways it destroyed parts of her life. She is a survivor. I was a distant bystander.

Even writing about it now feels weird and selfish. After it happened and I wrote about it, I got a series of internships that I’m positive were landed because of that reporting. Part of me has always felt strange about that, on the way 168 deaths opened career paths for me. Sometimes I feel gross for it and wonder if I would have earned those opportunities without the bombing coverage. It’s the same twinge I get when I wonder if affirmative action allowed my unusual name and brown skin color to get me into doors that I wouldn’t have been good enough to pass through otherwise. It’s not a good feeling to carry around, so I mostly don’t think about it. Or look back.

Maybe I should. I’ve never been to the memorial in Oklahoma City, though I’ve been back there a few times over the years. The closest I’ve come was visiting the 9/11 Museum in New York last year, where I got a weird feeling of déjà vu. First responders, fire, death, loss, reflection. The scale and the reasons were different, but the despair and horror identical. It’s possible to live with memories and feelings and to recognize how much of yourself was shaped by an event without actually processing it and to feel like you have no right to owning any of your role in it at all.

This will be short because it kind of has to be.

My word for 2015 is “Cohesion.”

Last year it was “Outside,” part of a goal of getting outside of my own head and being a greater part of the external world around me. That happened, to a large degree. I helped get a podcast launched that now puts me across a table from a great friend and a different guest every week and the conversations we have are wonderful and perspective-changing for me.

I haven’t gotten to travel as much as I’d like, though there was a surprise trip to New York City in the summer and more road trips than we were ever comfortable taking in the past with the kids. I got outside, though a big chunk of my time is still spent inside, nose to my phone, reading or connecting or Tweeting. That’s a habit I’m having a hard time breaking, though a lot of vacation time in December got me out of my usual habits.

Cohesion.

Here’s the thing: I’m doing fine, everything’s great, but writing-wise, I feel like I’m kind of a mess. I did a lot of writing in 2014, maybe too much and not all of it as high a quality as I would have liked. I wrote a lot of things in a rush, I wrote a lot of other things antsy and not wanting to be sitting and just feeling my attention drifting constantly.  I don’t have the patience to sit and write for hours like I used to and that’s caused all kind of problems with bigger projects.

Mostly, I’ve let my work stuff affect stuff I should be working on at home and stuff I’m working on at home distract me from getting enough rest to focus and adequately tackle my weekly workload. I perform well under pressure, but that’s been requiring constant panicked pressure, and of course that gets exhausting.

This blog is a good example of the breakdown of that cohesion. It used to be essays and personal reflections and over the last few years, it’s become a dumping ground for links to all my work projects and writing elsewhere.  And since the last few posts, I literally wrote so much stuff for work and did so many podcasts that I couldn’t physically even list them all here. Even a bulleted list of all that stuff seemed too overwhelming and I spend several weeks of vacation just dancing around the idea of doing that instead of actually doing it.

And I’m kind of glad. I shouldn’t have spent my free time stressing like that. And maybe I’ll get to that now that I’m getting back into work mode, but what if I don’t? Would it be the end of the world if I didn’t deliver those blog posts to the only person who really cares about them at this point, me? Why am I such a demanding boss to myself? Can I give me a raise or something?

Bottom line is that I’ve had work/life balance issues, and not because of anyone but myself. My workplace is incredibly supportive and lenient about my work hours, work-from-home days and how I meet my deadlines. So much so that I’ve become my own worst critic, calling myself out for stuff that seems fine to everyone else and feeling guilty for not pushing myself harder on personal writing (like this blog).

So for 2015, starting from this first day of the year, I want to have better cohesion of those separate parts of me. Of Work Omar¹ and Freelance Omar and Dad Omar, to make those guys work together instead of compartmentalizing and putting them at odds with each other. Am I the only one who feels like he’s wrangling different selves? Should I not have watched “The One I Love” right before bed?

There used to be a very clear line in my business between home writing and work writing and pretty organically, those lines have largely gone away. But I haven’t allowed myself to embrace that instead of creating more lines.

So, “Cohesion.” 2015.

That’s my word of the year.

And maybe I’ll get to those other catch-up blog posts, maybe not. I’ll let Complete Omar decide on that soon.

1

I hate when people refer to themselves in the third person. That’s Douche Omar talking, sorry.