The Identity Underneath the Byline

I’m Darren Samuelsohn and this is The love, journalism Show. Time to meet Taylor Six.

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On the night of December 12, 2021, another bar regular looked at Taylor Six and said something that changed the trajectory of her life. What was it, and why did it land the way it did?

Love, journalism readers got to meet Taylor earlier this week in our inaugural guest essay: You Are Not Alone. She’s the founder of the Journalists Recovery Network, and so it made sense to tape our podcast for National Recovery Month.

Both of us hope sharing what Taylor has built can help even one person.

It’s a powerful story: award-winning journalist by day, closing down the bar by night. Two versions of the same person coexisting, a fear of someone confronting her directly. We talked about battling addiction and the journalism identity, as well as the moment in recovery where identity starts loosening its grip.

Taylor’s group works with journalists across the recovery spectrum - sober, sober-curious, still figuring it out. She takes solace in her views of “enmeshment” - the way the job stops being what you do and becomes who you are.

“I can't overstate just like how freeing that was to know that that was actually something that was out there that explained so much of how I was feeling for years,” she said.

Taylor built the Journalists Recovery Network out of the 2023-24 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. She described the moment she realized journalists specifically needed something different; and what she tried before finding success leading a group that doesn’t promote any single method of sobriety.

As Taylor put it near the end of our conversation: “It’s okay to share our stories to make this field better for journalists who bravely continue to come into this field.”