1st Place, Personal Narrative
2024-25, Division 2, News Writing
By Tess Tarchak-Hiss
Occidentalist
Traverse City West Senior HS
Back in ‘ye old times, (summer of 2023), I was a tubby, Lil Yachty-listening, Bling Ring hyper-invested, demonic-doom-scrolling sailor. I was sailing the seven seas of Starbucks Venti Pumpkin Spice Chai Lattes and Jeremy Allen White Instagram Reels edits, drowning in my extremely messy boat of a bed being dragged down under by my various freaky Micheal Cera tapestries. In my solitude, I re-embraced the internet with open arms. I would drearily watch those online numbingly chatter about the ‘need to protect your peace,’ and how being alone is the only way to refuel. I would endlessly scroll through phony self-help videos and chuckle, like, Wow. Look at me protecting my peace rotting under my reeking duvet covers while submarines explode and Miranda Sings faces grooming allegations. Go me! I excused my rank, Gollum-like behavior with the label of being introverted. Since I was “introverted,” who really needed friends? Who really needed to be employed? Who really needed to leave their room, besides to get Doordash? I had me, myself, and I-and all the contestants on Master Chef Jr. What great company!
There’s a fine line between being introverted and shy which is constantly blended and overstepped. I take shyness as being coy and timid in certain situations, whereas introversion is recharging social batteries in solitude, to be 100 percent back at it for specific scenarios. I’m as reserved as an obnoxious Youtuber selling shady food products with mold on the bottom; I’m blunt, I’m confident, and I can confidently communicate with people without my words breaking in half like my ego whenever I have to tell people I’m edging seventeen and don’t have a driver’s license-right? Nope! Very wrong.
Navigating my tranquil “self-care” journey resulted in a lost bite-sized chunk of my ability to talk confidently face-to-face with my peers. Is this how people felt during COVID-19? Was I even old enough to blame COVID for my newly apparent antisocial personality-that was, like, decades ago! Despite the world being swept up in a sickness storm, 2020 was my dream; I could wake up whenever and do whatever (which was just playing Animal Crossing and watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in the dark until my eyes were so bloodshot I looked like Count Orlok in Nosferatu). My mom and sister were going psychotic; gnawing at the bars of their enclosure (which was created by 400 rolls of hoarded apocalypse-preparation Costco toilet paper), praying to the COVID gods for some sort of social interaction aside from the other two practically flourishing introverts in the household. My dad shared my ecstaticism about life falling apart to some degree. Together, we could sit for hours doing the minimum, basking in squeaky Baroque CDs while suffocating in an ocean of books, ranging from Harry Truman biographies to Ghost World to Judaism for Dummies. The bleakness of our mornings was bomb.
During COVID, we soaked up each other’s energy- or lack thereof. A mutual understanding was built that we were each other’s battery. Just existing by surviving in scratchy putrid yellow chairs (which may or may not have been doused in cat pee), with my dad gave me the energy boost to exist semi-normally, loving life and the three people in my circle.
My mom still says to me, “Your dad loved COVID as much as he loved you,” which, with the wrong context, could be a little damaging to my self-esteem. When he died, I had nobody to just exist with. The banana-colored chairs browned, the questionable music choices muzzled, the tensions and voices and screaming and spatting heightened. Worst of all: school started in four days. What were my Tomodachi Life Miis, clearly my most pressing life issue, going to do without my constant attention? Being released into the real-world wilderness of middle school and high school alike drained me as much as the next socially isolated teenager with a bad bleach and tone. With energy depleted beyond capacity, I now try to be introverted, I try to be quiet, I try to exist alone in my sphere. I try to find that battery and balance, but it’s in a box on the bookshelf next to The Brick Testament and Rosanna Pansino’s Nerdy Nummies cookbook. So instead of whipping around in friends’ cars listening to SOS: Deluxe, instead of getting mid tacos at obnoxious hipster restaurants with luminescent and overpriced mocktails on Monday nights, instead of enjoying life to the fullest extent that a teenager without a license or a job can, I get sucked up into a whirlpool of “mental self-care” in the comfort of my covers and Wingstop mukbang videos, despite it knocking down the idea of love and life I envisioned for myself since I was stuck in my COVID cage.
NW-14. Personal Narrative
This is not an opinion piece. It is a first-person account of an event or series of events that constitute a single, profound experience. The focus of the piece is on narrative — telling the story of the experience. It can be written in present or past tense. The author should take extra efforts to describe the journey and explain its importance. Dialogue and internal dialogue are essential. Submit a PDF of the print page(s) on which the story was published or the URL to the story on an online news site.
JUDGING CRITERIA
- A first-person account depicting a personal experience
- Lead captures attention, arouses curiosity
- Topic relevant to interests and/or welfare of school or students
- Effectively combines basics of good news and feature writing
- Effectively organized with smooth transitions; carefully outlined
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar
- Should have byline, which could include mug shot of writer