The fire shrunk
My body said park it. Get off the screens. Get off the news. I listened.
I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and this is love, journalism.
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My workstation at the end looked like this: three monitors including my laptop. Inside each monitor, more tabs than I could count. Teams active at all hours. Email loaded with Reuters alerts on every Trump mention. A five-column TweetDeck. A four-screen Google TV live news feed on my iPad. My phone for when the computers slowed down.
Then it all stopped.
I never had a job like my last one. As my role expanded — ultimately to include the White House — so did everything that came with it. The screens weren’t vanity. They were the job. Managing a team chasing the biggest story in the country means you need the full view, all the time. Pirate ship. Flying the Millennium Falcon. Offensive coordinator. I’ve used all three metaphors to describe what it felt like from the inside.
White House editor is one of the hardest jobs in Washington. The next deadline never stops. The competition never sleeps. The algorithms don’t care how tired you are. I’d done versions of it before as a reporter — at Politico, during the 2012 campaign, the Mueller investigation, the first impeachment. That stretch put me in the hospital. I came back. I got better. Then I did it again.
I found the right help. I wish I’d asked for it sooner.
Still — the fire shrunk. That’s the only way I know how to say it. The fire to chase the story, to be in the middle of it all, every day, all the time. It got quieter. My body said park it. Get off the screens. Get off the news. And this time I listened.
The detox was real. Twitter gone. Facebook gone. News intake reduced to something that would have looked familiar to a person from 1995 — reading the actual print newspaper. A newsman going back to newsprint.
What followed was something I’m still taking stock of. Daily journaling. Naps. Rest. Untangling the garden hose, which is what I call the slow work of getting your head and body back. A family cruise with more than two dozen people — three generations, custom shirts and hats. Then Scotland. Thirteen rounds of golf at twelve courses over three weeks. I learned about the shooting at the White House correspondents dinner the following morning, from a friend in Missouri.
Japan is coming. The first time back since 1998.
I’ve been reading old journals. Decades of them. Young Darren moves in the right directions but doesn’t know so many things yet. The value of rest. How to maintain health. How to nurture the relationships that matter. Reading him now, knowing how it all turned out, is something I don’t have all the words for yet.
What I do have is this: three years ago, journalism fired me. And I named this thing love, journalism anyway. At the time I thought I was being defiant. Now I think I was being accurate.
Journalism loved me back. Like any relationship though — it was on its own terms.
What a reset, Darren. I'd love to have you on Sustain What to talk more about what you've learned so far and where you're headed. revkin@substackcom to set it up.
Really enjoying your newsletter, Darren.