Maia Ferdman: Discovering ourselves through the blank page
By Maia Ferdman
June 7, 2015 9:06 p.m.
I dread the emptiness of a blank white page and the impatience of a blinking cursor.
To confront that blankness, armed with nothing but a pen or a keyboard, a mind and maybe an idea, is intimidating.
And yet, it is something journalists and writers do constantly. They conquer the cursor, tell stories, weave data together and lay bare what was hidden or obscured.
For me, a blank page is a mirror. Every time I choose to fill this space, I imprint a piece of myself onto the world. I may not know what that imprint will look like before I start writing, and I know that the first draft is never the last. Yet each draft and revision gets me closer to representing who I am.
As an Opinion columnist at the Daily Bruin, I strove to fill these pages with the most honest reflection of myself I could muster. In some of my favorite pieces I laid myself bare – I wrote about my culture, my inner conflicts and my politics. I often started writing before I knew where it would lead me. In this way, the Daily Bruin allowed me to discover and solidify pieces of myself that I did not recognize or understand before.
Writing became my refuge. When grappling with difficult topics like Israel-Palestine, local government or campus climate while also navigating the personal challenges of college, it sometimes felt like everything around me was unstable and crumbling. But I could always anchor myself in words.
Journalism allowed me to lay bare other people’s stories as well. I interviewed professors, students, administrators and government representatives who at their core were researchers, refugees, activists, allies and experts. I can only hope that individuals like these will continue to grant me the privilege of reporting their stories with the compassion and accuracy that they deserve.
Whether telling our own truths, or reporting on someone else’s, writing is both a responsibility and an experiment. We learn to accept the beautiful tension between a proud final draft and the knowledge that it is never really finished. There is always something left unsaid, something worded incorrectly, something that sounds a bit cliched.
As we prepare to graduate from UCLA, we live and breathe this tension. Every year is a blank page. Every day a blinking cursor. Every past and future class, test, relationship and job is a perpetual rough draft, with each one revealing something about who we are and imprinting it onto the world.
Thank you to the editors, critics and avid readers who make each blank page worth filling over and over again. And thank you to my mentors, friends and family, whose constant love and support has imprinted itself onto me.
It is now time to close this document – until the next draft.
Ferdman was an Opinion columnist from 2012-2014 and a News contributor from 2011-2012.
