Chelsea knew from the moment she stepped onto the airplane that she was in over her head.
Imposter syndrome. That’s what her life coach called this feeling. The sense that no matter how far Chelsea advanced in her field, she still lived each and every day in constant fear of being discovered.
What would her colleagues do when they realized she was a fraud?
Chelsea had begged and schmoozed and pleaded in order to get this assignment. And now that she was on her way to Detroit, the nerves threatened to make her throw up.
Great. That’s all she needed to start her three-hour flight.
Chelsea was one of the first passengers to board. A few men in stuffy business suits glared at her first-class seat, no doubt wondering why a 23-year-old who barely topped five feet tall needed that much extra leg room.
The truth was Chelsea didn’t need the extra leg room. She’d splurged for the upgrade because her life coach told her to. If Chelsea wanted other people to take her and her career seriously, she had to take herself and her career seriously.
Starting with first-class seats.
She shouldn’t feel guilty, right? After all, it was Clark’s idea, not hers. She was just doing what her life coach told her to do.
Now that she was sitting here, with twice the space she actually needed, Chelsea couldn’t remember why this frivolous luxury had seemed like such a good idea.
Tired of questioning herself, her career choices, and her right to be sitting here in first class, Chelsea did her best to silence that inner critic she hated so much. Instead, she did what came most naturally to her as a writer. She stared at the travelers as they boarded the plane, trying to come up with backstories for each and every one of them.
There were two girls, college aged by the looks of them, giggling as they lugged their mismatched carry-ons down the aisle. “You’re gonna love Alaska,” said one with bright blue highlights in her hair. “It’s wicked awesome.”
Alaska. Chelsea tried to picture what that might be like, but all her mind could conjure up were images of sled dogs and igloos. Somehow, she doubted that’s how this cosmopolitan young passenger lived.
A scowling man with an SVSU sweatshirt boarded soon after. Chelsea thought through all of the local colleges and universities in the Boston area, trying to figure out if she could place the acronym. He wasn’t dressed like a typical businessman. Maybe a divorcé on the way to visit his kids? He didn’t strike Chelsea as the type to be racing off toward an illicit affair. More likely he was flying to Detroit to visit his beloved granny.
Chelsea sat back in her seat, ignoring the initial pangs of what was likely to turn into a piercing headache. When she’d graduated with her journalism degree, Chelsea had been so excited. So eager. A stereotype, really. Journalism major about to make a name for herself while simultaneously changing the world one perfectly constructed paragraph at a time.
And here she was, just a few years later, already turning into another trope — the jaded, lonely single woman wondering what she was doing chasing scoops and investigating scandals when the very next week the public would forget everything she wrote about in the first place.
Chelsea had begged her editor for the chance to cover the Brown Elementary controversy. A primary school in Detroit had been built on land that had once been the illegal dumping grounds for a pharmaceutical company. Tiny kindergartners were landing in the ER with respiratory problems and horrific fevers and rashes, but the school district claimed it had nothing to do with the school’s location. Chelsea didn’t understand why the entire country hadn’t already shown up to march on the superintendent’s home. Most people on the East Coast hadn’t even heard of Brown Elementary School.
It was the kind of story that propelled Chelsea into reporting in the first place. Immigrant parents, many who could barely speak English, weren’t given a voice. The children served by Brown Elementary were among Detroit’s poorest, which is why the superintendent assumed he could get away with poisoning each and every one of them.
At her most zealous, Chelsea would have considered this the perfect assignment. Brown Elementary was news on a national scale. It was also the entire reason she dove into journalism as a wide-eyed first-year college student in the first place. To give a voice to the voiceless. To speak up for the downtrodden, shine the light on oppression, and just about any other cliché you could come up with.
But now she knew what to expect. She’d show up in Detroit, interview some of the parents whose kids had fallen ill, talk to the few key players who were trying to stand up for this underrepresented community. Then she’d fly back to Boston, type up her story, maybe even get choked up as she did her best to represent the frustration these parents felt. If she did her job well, she might even get a little nod from her editor, a pat on the back or a “Nice article” from one of her colleagues.
And then nothing.
No marches on Detroit. No public outcry. No real justice for the kids of Brown Elementary.
In short, no change.
So why did she keep doing it?
At her most jaded, she’d probably answer because it paid the bills. A journalism degree wasn’t cheap, and at the rate she was going she’d have to keep writing until she was eighty to pay off all her debt.
But there was still something inside her, something that hadn’t yet been completely hardened. The idealistic, trusting, impossible hope that this time would be different. Her upcoming article would be the one that made that lasting impact. That effected positive change. That united citizens from across the political spectrum, that inspired the general public to rise up and support the children of Detroit.
She could always hope, right?
Chelsea opened the lid of her water bottle and took a big drink.
Working on this story was a dream come true for her, and she didn’t want to reach such a pessimistic state that she refused to see it for the incredible opportunity it was.
As men, women, and children continued to file past her first-class seat, Chelsea took a deep breath, reminded herself that this trip represented the entire reason she’d gotten into journalism in the first place, and allowed her mind to hope and dream.