Finding my MoJo: Going from Crippling Anxiety to Mobile Journalist.
I start this short introduction by clarifying that the mojo I have lost, found and become is very different to Austin Powers’. For starters, I’m female and for those of you who have seen the films, you’d realise why I’d have a hard time finding the same mojo Austin Powers was in search of. Before those graphics begin to linger around for too long, let’s move on. The one possible thing Mr Powers and I could have in common however is the outdated outfits, as I’ll still be paying off my student loans well into the foreseeable future! With that established, here is my story and how I’ve arrived at your screen introducing myself as a Multiplatform and Mobile Journalist to the Medium community.
A year or so back, you would have been reading about a very different person.
It’s 9am in Liverpool. Late September 2014. My first year of my Bachelor’s degree. I’ve woken up to get to my 10am lecture. I’ve barely slept, my stomach is knotted, heart racing. I’m feeling lethargic, unmotivated and as if I was walking around all day trapped in a bubble. As hundreds of thoughts circulate my mind before I’ve even gotten out of bed, I’m trying to think of excuses not to go to my seminar and slip quietly back into the safety of my little flat. Why? I had made friends, my course was enjoyable and Liverpool was a beautiful city which I had wasted no time in going out to explore over my first few weeks. So, why?
What I was experiencing were the unpleasant symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Something I wasn’t to know until two years later when I’d moved back home having completed my degree. In the meantime, I’d somehow cultivated a high-functioning albeit unhealthy ability to get through my degree, and more miraculously, come out with first-class honours.
Here I was again. July 2017. I have just graduated. Feeling anxious, deflated, confused as to why I was feeling like this. Considering I love to travel and explore the World around me, even leaving my house to pop to the supermarket was now an exhausting feet. Despite my academic achievements and having an amazing backpacking trip lined up in the summer, I was feeling so incredibly far away from myself. This is something both myself and everybody around me couldn’t understand. I soon started to panic that this was who I was going to be from now on. I feared I would never travel around the World or have a successful career in journalism. But these very two ambitions were still right there through my lowest points, a little clouded over, but there.
Fast-forward again to August 2018. It’s 2pm and I’m back in Birmingham. I’ve barely slept, my stomach is knotted, heart racing. I’m excited. Still slightly tanned from my weeks’ spent backpacking around Southeast Asia, I’m preparing to go live on my first ever radio show. I feel so incredibly myself and I’m bursting to put that out there in the universe. You’d have a hard time trying to shut me up now, particularly if you get me on the subject of travel! This isn’t the new me, this is just me — finally! I feel more myself, more where I’m meant to be than I have done in forever. I’ve re-gained my mojo, as a MoJo.
I wake up now, nice and early. Hundreds of thoughts circulate my mind before I’ve even gotten out of bed. I’m trying to think of ways I can tell my next story. Is it going to be mobile? Web? Broadcast? I’ll think about it on my way in to class. Who will inform my narratives this week? That would be a great story…. my mind wonders.
My body calm and full of energy, I’m excited for the year ahead… and for my life as the next BBC Travel Show presenter/Stacey Dooley (one can dream!).
