me, rachel

This week, the yearbook came out. It was awesome. It was full of bright colors, crazy monsters, and even had a pop-up. It was the colors of kindergarten and held the attention of college students, whose attention span is shorter than that of a kindergartner. It was basically awesome.

And I got to work on it.

Opportunities like this don't happen very often. Yes, freshmen work on their school yearbooks everyday, everywhere. That's totally normal. Freshmen can take pictures, or insert text, or do the busy work of figuring out names for captions. Freshmen can totally do those things.

Freshmen can't edit it. They absolutely cannot have a position of leadership. They can't design things. There is no way a freshman can be a layout editor of the University yearbook. Never in a million years.

Except me.

They hired me on as the layout editor the beginning of last year, and it was the best opportunity ever. They didn't want to retrain people every year, so a freshman seemed like a great choice! I did my best, but had never worked on a yearbook before. Basically I didn't really know what I was doing. I had no training and no experience. I didn't try my hardest because I was afraid of doing something wrong. Instead I did everything wrong by not trying.

Because of my lack of training and my fear of failure, I lost that job at the end of the year. I'm ok with it now, but it was really hard then. I can see now that it was not entirely my fault, neither was it entirely theirs. I'm cool with it.

This semester, when the yearbook came out, I was super excited to see it! I helped design it, after all! This was my baby!

Until it was announced I was almost giddy. Then I wanted to cry. I realized I had worked on this book, I may not have been the best editor ever, but I worked hard. And now I had nothing to do with it. I couldn't be at the dedication luncheon. I didn't have any influence over the book anymore. My hard work had turned into frustration and bitterness, and eventually faded into mild discomfort.

Now I have this beautiful book with my name engraved on the cover, and I can't decide if I want to pour over it and see the most beautiful publication I've ever been apart of, or if I want to leave it at home and not look at it for a long, long time.