In Defense of Uprooting

Living the dream...until suddenly I wasn't.

If I’m honest, I hadn’t been happy in my reporting job for a while. From the outside, it looked like I was having the time of my life. I was often leading the top story for the highest-rated newscast at CBS San Francisco. Switch on your television on any given night, and you could find me reporting from Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper conference, interviewing some of the best basketball players in the NBA, hosting my own show, or creating the first documentary of its kind on racial justice. Outside of the newsroom, I was teaching a journalism class at UC Berkeley and serving as Vice President of Broadcast on the board of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association. It was exhilarating and important work, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that this juggling act was my way of trying to escape a creeping, uncomfortable reality: I had hit a wall in my professional life. Covering the city of Oakland for CBS San Francisco had been my dream job, but eight years in, I felt I had learned everything I could. I found myself depleted, disinterested, and desperately craving a change of scene.
The problem was I had developed deep roots in the Bay Area. I forged trusted relationships with city officials and other sources. I met my husband in the Bay Area, formed new friendships, and developed a closer bond with my sister, who was just a short drive away. But establishing roots is tricky business. The deeper they grow, the more difficult it becomes to extricate yourself, to stay mobile, to shake things up. I had fallen into the trap of stagnant safety.
My closest friend had been actively trying to lure me to the Pacific Northwest for more than a decade. My interest was always half-hearted, my resistance grounded firmly in family history. I’m a sixth-generation Californian. My ancestors moved to the Bay Area as slaves during the gold rush. It was in California that they became free and founded a church that still stands in San Jose. Becoming Californians was not geographical happenstance for my ancestors. It was essential for survival as the Civil War raged on. More than a century later, California became my birthright.
But the Pacific Northwest was tugging on me. When one of my favorite bosses left San Francisco to become the head of the NBC station in Seattle, I took a deep breath and reached out. Within weeks, I was being offered a reporting job.
I can’t say I didn’t have reservations. I grew up in Sacramento’s arid summer heat. Like most Californians, I hear the word Seattle and it conjures up images of stormy weather and year-round gloom. To be fair, within months, I was faced with the city’s rainiest day in a decade.  In February, it rained almost every day of the month. During one live shot, I struggled to see and speak as gusty wind blew a blast of torrential rain into my eyes, nose and mouth.   
But more often than not, the rain comes, pleasant and perfunctory, and passes on. I find myself studying the skies in a way I never have—marveling at complex cloud formations, at once heavy and buoyant, mammoth and meditative.  I watch a slice of the Puget Sound from my living room—choppy one day, placid the next, the surface of the waters broken briefly by barges or, when the season is right, the odd Orca. Sun breaks come quickly and unpredictably and engender an appreciation that I never had when they were the norm.
It is quiet here. Trees are stately and green, overrun with cherry blossoms or apples that grow wild as weeds. Bald eagles flock like seagulls to vacant beaches. They perch casually on washed-up driftwood, their presence at once majestic and mundane. The sky is ever-changing, the clouds restless and reshuffling by the moment, overlapping then withdrawing to expose mountain ranges here, an awe-inspiring volcano there.
As journalists, we are taught to eschew editorializing or opinion, to elevate fact above all else. It can be difficult to abandon rationality and tap into what we know to be true inside. I have no data to prove that coming to Washington was the right move. Uprooting left me uncertain and exposed, but I have discovered beauty in the unknown. Like a plant pulled from soil, I’ve shaken off what was holding me back. I’ve replanted. I’ve opened up, and I find myself growing again.  

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