Staying in motion

editor-in-chief

<p>Claire Ballentine was editor-in-chief of The Chronicle's 112th volume.&nbsp;</p>

Claire Ballentine was editor-in-chief of The Chronicle's 112th volume. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a runner.

Every morning, the first thing I do is run four miles. Pavement, treadmill, snow—it really doesn’t matter as long as I can feel the burning in my legs and the rush of endorphins.

I also like to run from my problems.

When I decided to run for editor-in-chief of The Chronicle, my mom was battling stage-four melanoma. I first found out she was sick the previous summer while on campus working for The Chronicle’s summer coverage. A doctor told me her illness was terminal on the same day I had scheduled an interview for a story on housing in Edens; it’s the only story I’ve ever dropped.

The following semester back at Duke, I threw myself into The Chronicle as university editor, trying to stay as busy as I could to numb the pain of knowing that my mom was dying. When this didn’t work—too much free time, too much time to think about the future—I decided to run for editor-in-chief.

By the time editor elections rolled around, my mom had passed away and I was left reeling in a month so painful that I’ve blocked most of it out from my memory. The only solution I could think of was to devote as much time as possible to The Chronicle.

As I prepared to take the helm by spending late nights trying and failing to successfully layout a print paper and getting to know the staff I would soon spend 80 hours a week with, I shut off my emotions and focused single-mindedly on the task of leading this paper I love so much.

I traded nights crying on my best friends’ floor for long sessions of copyediting in Flowers 301. I obsessed over writing stories, planning coverage of the 2016 election, training new writers and answering emails from angry readers. I avoided my personal life by turning to my Chronicle life, where there were straightforward answers to (most) problems. I could consult the AP stylebook, past Chronicle articles, former editors. My own demons were harder to nail down.

After months of putting off my feelings, viewing crying as failure and telling myself that my tragedy was not unique, my emotions eventually caught up with me. But when they did, I was whole again.

In Flowers 301, I had a support system—they made the long nights fun and the problems easier to handle. Knowing that we were a team made my time as editor infinitely better. The office became a home base for me (as you could tell from my posters of alpacas and “Daily B*tch” calendar).

Running a newspaper is no easy task, and this year was filled with stress, late nights and criticism. But somehow, amid all the incensed emails and phone calls, the pressure of worrying about making a mistake and my own personal drama, this turned out to be the best year of my life. There’s something incredibly fulfilling about going home each night knowing that you and your team have created a paper from scratch, crafted stories that are informative or insightful or even controversial. It’s been far more meaningful to me than studying my Spanish vocab or reading my sociology textbook. The Chronicle gave me an unbelievable sense that my work mattered.

The best part by far though was the people. Adam Beyer, our digital content director, kept our spirits up with his Snapchat filters, Spotify playlists, Hamilton puns and endless spirit of optimism and curiosity. I’ll never forget when I walked up the winding staircase to the office one day and saw that he had made a sign that said “Keep going, you’re almost there!” on the second floor bulletin board.

Our news editor Abby Xie was my partner in ignorance about anything sports-related. She was endlessly reliable and hardworking and saved me countless times when I couldn’t understand a health/science article. Neel Moorthy, the managing editor, was the perfect counterbalance to my sometimes blind optimism. I’m still amazed by his editing speed, knowledge of legal matters and ability to dramatically throw himself on the floor when a source says something particularly ridiculous.

Sports editor and former editor-in-chief Amrith Ramkumar was the best mentor to me for the past two years. Having a voice of reason and experience to talk me out of throwing myself out the window was incredibly valuable. He also fixed the printer and InDesign more times than I can count and taught me basketball terms that I have since forgotten.

Sometimes I’m not really sure how I made it through the year, especially those days when I only got four hours of sleep and one day blurred into the next. When I shadowed President Brodhead in November for an article, he told me that “a body in motion tends to stay in motion.” That’s the only way I can describe how I kept going the whole year—sometimes continuing is easier than slowing down.

Now that my time as editor has come to an end, I’ll need to throw myself into something else. Part of that will definitely be continuing my work with The Chronicle as Towerview editor with Neel, but I’ll suddenly have more free time to spend how I want. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

But I’m going to keep running.

Claire Ballentine is a Trinity junior and editor-in-chief of The Chronicle. Like her predecessors, she aches with the knowledge that she will never be either again. In addition to the people she already named, she would like to thank Micki Werner, her best friend from Tennessee who has always wanted her name featured in a Chronicle article.

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