Recently, I watched a movie called September 5, which is about ABC Sports’ news coverage of the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. This movie piqued my interest because I work in the news and the trailer and modest 90 minute runtime convinced me to watch it on Paramount+. In the final scene of the movie, the protagonist, a plucky young control room director that spent nearly 24 hours coordinating live coverage of the entire ordeal, gets into his car to drive to his accommodations in Munich. Before he does, though, his boss tells him to get some rest and come back tomorrow. One of the reporters has an idea for a one-hour special honoring the Israelis, whom they erroneously reported had survived the kidnapping just hours previous. That one scene sold the whole movie for me because I identified with it so much.

I’ve witnessed and processed a lot of major events sitting at my desk at work. Some were mostly inconsequential, like the queen of England dying or a new American pope being elected, but the first one that had any real effect on me was the 2023 tornado in my hometown of Selma, Alabama.

It was January 12th, a Monday. The day started normally enough. Those days, I was working at my godawful first job, and my days were usually spent going down Wikipedia rabbit holes or mindlessly browsing Twitter (back when it was still fun to do so) under the guise of managing the social media of the nonprofit I worked for because they refused to give me any actual videography work. Around lunchtime, #alwx started trending on Twitter, so I had a look. What I saw gave me bone-chilling dread that I’ve yet to experience again.

Several meteorologists were tweeting about tornadic activity in central Alabama, specifically very near Selma. Even more were telling people in the area to get in their safe places. Clips of newscasts were being posted, orange and dark red polygons overlapping streets I knew well. And then, the one image that caused me to start properly freaking out: I can’t remember what exactly it was even portraying, but all I remember is this big blue circle on a map around essentially the entire city of Selma.

My hands started shaking. I was trying to keep it together because in this small, brightly-lit open plan office, everyone can see each other. I did not want my coworkers to see my cry. I switched to live coverage from the area’s local news station and watched in real time on radar as the storm passed over the tiny city. This ordeal lasted maybe only 10 minutes, but it felt like forever.

For 10 minutes, I didn’t know if the home that I’d only left a year and a half ago was still standing. For 10 minutes, I didn’t know if my mom was alive or not. For 10 minutes, I was the closest to despair as I had ever been in my 23 years of life. My silly nightmares about this very thing happening were now coming true. And I wasn’t even there – I was 200 miles away in an office that I resented driving to week after week, at a job I was actively trying to leave.

Eventually, I walked outside, away from the eyes and ears of my coworkers, and called my mom. She picked up, sounding really normal somehow. I could barely speak before I broke down.

Selma took a direct hit from the tornado, and it clawed a nasty gash through the downtown area, just one mile south of our house. Lots of people lost their homes, but no one died. My mom told me her power didn’t even go out. As I have learned from the devastating 2023 Rolling Fork tornado, your chances of survival are much better if it strikes in the daytime.

After I got off the phone with my mom, I returned to my desk, bleary-eyed and numb. All I could do was keep refreshing Twitter to see more pictures and videos of destruction. Buildings I’d driven past probably thousands of times without a second thought were now levelled. It’s surreal to go on Google Street View in various places in the city and see the mark left behind. Although the stadium I graduated high school at in Bloch Park has been repaired, several of the old live oak trees lining the street are gone.

We had a meeting later that day, but I could only focus on the TV in the office playing CNN. There was the video taken from the front of Selma’s Walmart showing the insane breadth of the EF-2 tornado playing and replaying next to live shots of reporters on the ground and anchors in the studio. This became national news not only because of the amount of destruction, but because of the historic nature of the city itself–although, in my opinion, people were focused far too much on history and not of the hundreds of real, alive people affected by the tornado, but that is a topic for another essay.

The day ended. I went home, had dinner, went to bed, woke up the next day, and went back to work like the previous day wasn’t one of the most harrowing of my life. What else was I to do? My mom discouraged me from coming home in the middle of the week (not that I was planning on it) and assured me all was okay on the home front, so my only option was to go back to that open plan office to sit in my plastic rolling chair and stare at the powder blue iMac that was my workstation. I didn’t even talk about it in therapy.

Now that I do work in the news, there’s hardly any time to think about these things when it happens. With storms, wall-to-wall coverage keeps the meteorologists and producers busy, and I’m watching as well to write down timestamps of good soundbites to use for promos about our coverage. With non-weather events, the energy is the same. I’ve written before about the strange dichotomy of my line of work, being constantly confronted with tragedy but not really being able to approach it from an angle other than how can we put this out first and better than our competitors? People being reduced to headlines chips away at your humanity a little.

I like my job. Sometimes I love it. I could see myself doing this for a long time. But more and more recently, as I sit at my cubicle in my 10,000 lumen, freezing cold newsroom, I wonder how much more of this I can take. Not the work itself, but the desensitization to it all.

In the past couple of months, there has been more than one apartment complex in the city of Jackson with absentee landlords delinquent on water bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have had their water access shut off. Aside from the absentee landlords and the near-million dollar debts, what these complexes had in common was that the people living there used HUD assistance to do so. So when their water got cut off (through no fault of their own, mind you–they were paying their bills directly to their landlords, their landlords weren’t paying JXN Water), they were stuck. From my understanding, it takes a while to even get HUD assistance, let alone find another apartment complex with vacancies that will accept it. The residents were stuck there for weeks. And each morning, I heard every update in news meetings and proceeded with my day. After all, this injustice was just one of the many packages that filled up runtime in our evening newscasts.

All of this is before the events of September 10th, yet another major event I saw unfold in the middle of the day while I was at work. Now, I think I have reached my point. Not necessarily because of what happened–the outcome was shocking, yes, but violence is part and parcel of our national identity, whether people want to admit it or not–but because I know things are likely going to get way worse, and I will probably watch it happen at my cubicle, unable to even truly process it because the client with unrealistic expectations wanted this furniture store commercial two days ago.

Would any of this be better if I wasn’t at work? Probably not. If I was in town when the Selma tornado happened, I probably would have had a breakdown. I saw January 6 happen from my living room, and being at home didn’t make it any less insane. I wasn’t alive for the Challenger disaster and was too young to remember 9/11, so I can’t help but feel that the “big one” for my generation hasn’t happened yet. Or maybe it has, and we’ve just been so overexposed to tragedy that we haven’t even realized it.

My mom told me this story once about my parents’ first date. It was at a now-closed Chinese restaurant downtown. The date was going well, by her recollection, until my dad’s beeper went off. He had to leave the date to go back to the paper to change the next day’s headlines because Operation Desert Storm had just happened. I guess despite that, he made a good enough impression, because they would get engaged after just six months of dating.

Part of me thinks that when society finally collapses, I’ll be at work trying to send an email. What a visual.