Mission 100 Days: Right place, right time

By Ava C. Green, Editor-in-Chief

In the past four years, I’ve written in roughly 90 editions of The Griffin, published over 40 editions as Editor-in-Chief, been in the office well past midnight about a hundred times and have grown four gray hairs. And in that time, I started and deleted about a million different versions of this article that all began like this one: quantitatively. 

Maybe that makes sense, that my brain – after four years focused on deadlines and word counts and page dimensions – is looking back on a time trying to enumerate it. But I think counting pages is much easier than measuring what they gave me.

I’m not the type to be shy about expressing my feelings, and I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that taking on a leadership role at The Griffin – as well as the countless other things I’m involved in at Canisius – has brought me a good amount of stress. I’ve cringed at mistakes made in print, I’ve neglected to catch those mistakes in time, I’ve doubted myself over and over again. 

Now, I know this already reads like I’m painting myself to be some martyr to this paper, but there is a reason I stress this stress. 

People seem not to understand why on earth I’ve decided to put so much on my plate these last four years. Sure, the work and the scheduling and the overall pressure isn’t always fun, but the feeling of people needing me was something I always kind of craved. Before that pressure, I wasn’t even sure I had a pulse. 

I came to Canisius as a marketing major, looking for nothing more than making it through the next four years. It was kind of like that in high school too, a painfully average student with no scholastic motivation. To make up for it, I tried every extracurricular my school had from cheerleading to student council. I wanted so badly to be busy, to be good at something, to be a part of something bigger than myself. But that desire didn’t make up for my lack of skill, passion and confidence in the activities offered, and my involvement in those things usually never stuck for more than a year. 

Within a few weeks at Canisius, I started failing all my business classes and became a below average student with no scholastic motivation. My first long weekend home from school, I broke down to my parents, confessed my failures, told them I didn’t have a future at Canisius and that I didn’t want to go back. I was furious that they weren’t on board for me waving my white flag at Canisius, but I remember my mom pitching it to me as the opportunity for a comeback. And I’ve always loved a good underdog story. 

I came back from break and immediately switched my major to journalism. I started casually submitting Griffin articles pretty early on, in hopes that it would start to create a path for me to find my future. I’ve never had a five-year plan, and sometimes I don't even have a five-minute plan. When I was asked to join the staff of The Griffin as the assistant editor under Julia Barth in features, it felt like I was being offered a way in, a chance to tie myself to something real, to have a plan and a future. For the first time I thought, what if I didn’t bail out? What if I saw this thing through? 

It’s safe to say I did see it through, but it’s not like everything clicked in that moment. My first few weeks on the staff, I didn’t even go to the office. Those guys had inside jokes, the “inside scoop” and way more experience than me. But I think something in me knew that if I could walk through that door, every other new door around here would feel less daunting, and over time, I proved I was right. 

I found out at the end of the year that Julia was going to be applying for Editor-in-Chief, and with the features editor spot open and much more experience and confidence than before, moving up felt like a natural next step. I paid my dues as the assistant; I knew the ins and outs of the section and felt like I knew what I was doing. The role became second nature and I got comfortable. 

So comfortable that I didn’t even consider applying for a new position at the end of my sophomore year. I still felt like kind of a fake journalist compared to the rest of the staff and I felt lucky just to be a part of the team. But actually, that’s something I’ve been trying not to say so much. That I’m “lucky.” 

I’ve spent a lot of my time at Canisius trying to explain myself away by saying I was just in the right place at the right time. That I must have a rabbit’s foot or a four-leaf clover hiding in my back pocket. That things just seem to happen to me. And at some point, I started to believe it.

I definitely believed it was luck that got me the position of Editor-in-Chief my junior year. Blinded by self-doubt, I was convinced Julia only picked me because we were friends. I was convinced she made a huge mistake and convinced I was in way over my head. It’s still hard to shake those thoughts even now.

On the print night of Julia’s last edition as Editor-in-Chief, as per Griffin tradition, the incoming staff was shown the ropes and took the lead. I remember my managing editor, Jon Dusza, and I exchanging looks of utter panic, realizing what we had just agreed to take on. That night I wrote in my journal (corny, I know) about how not ready I was for all of it. Despite that and despite all my doubt leading up to that, the journal entry ended with, “They trust me and I trust them, so I guess I have to trust me too.” 

But it took more than that sentiment, as sweet as it was, to push through the years of imposter syndrome working against me. Dan Higgins, our paper’s advisor at the time, told Jon and I at the beginning of our first year in charge to embrace the fact that we were underclassmen status, to use this year to take risks, learn from them and bring what we learned into the next year. I think I took that advice a little too literally. We definitely took risks. 

We made mistakes, made adjustments and still somehow pulled off a paper each week. But something started shifting because of that “trial” year. Slowly, the panic began to fade, and the voice in my head whispering you don’t belong here got a little quieter. Somewhere between rewriting headlines at 2 a.m. and obsessing over InDesign margins, I stopped feeling like I was pretending. 

This wasn’t because I suddenly felt ready. I don’t think I’ve ever actually felt ready and I doubt I ever will. Not when I changed my major, not when I joined the staff and definitely not when I took over the paper. The truth is, most of the things I’ve done at Canisius started with me feeling completely unqualified to do them. That fear never fully disappeared, but I stopped waiting to feel ready and started trusting that I'd figure it out anyway. 

And I never had to figure it out alone. I had Jon. From the very beginning, he met my chaos with calm and my ideas with even better ones. I truly cannot imagine these last two years without him across the room. I’ve also had staffs full of people who made the late nights worth it, who matched my stress with their support, who reminded me week after week why I kept going. I’ll never be able to thank them enough, no matter how many sappy GroupMe messages I send. 

It didn’t feel like my life here at Canisius really started until I joined this paper. The Griffin didn’t just give me a place to write; it gave me people who believed in me when I couldn’t. It gave me reasons to stay, to try, to show up even when I was scared out of my mind, and made me who I am today. I became a lot braver in this windowless little office, and I guess I did get lucky that it was the right place at the right time. 

So, to whoever’s up next, get used to that pit in your stomach when you pick up your first edition as Editor-in-Chief, and keep chasing that feeling.