News

Afraid of the “no”

200712_identify.jpgA woman’s struggle to face down social anxiety disorder.


 

Jeanne had long harbored a crush on the short Indian man who played squash at her gym. For more than a year she tried to relax and talk to him. But she usually just stared at him while telling herself “you know, you should really say something. Like, ‘Hello.’”
   
One time, she did manage to have a conversation with him. He was smiling, friendly, and seemed happy to see her. She became so tense that she could barely think. For reasons she can’t recall, she abruptly blurted out that he should just go see a doctor about his knee. He excused himself and walked away.
   
The man tried to talk to her a few more times, but each time, Jeanne was tense and terse, and each time, he backed away. Jeanne saw him one more time at the squash court, and desperately wanted to explain how sorry she was and how much she liked him. But she couldn’t, and he left.
   
That was five years ago. Just recently, they again ran into each other at the gym. He quickly left while his brother gave her dirty looks.

“You just want to cry from how tragic it is,” she says. “Even now, I can’t even say hello.”

Speechless

Today, after 11 years of therapy, numerous self-help books, and finally, a four-month class on identifying and working through anxious thoughts, Jeanne, who asked that her real name not be used out of concern for her privacy, is buoyant as she shows me around her Brooklyn neighborhood. At first she seems unfazed by the crowd in the café we head to, but after we find a table in the back, she gives stares at anyone who walks by or sits next to us. She pushes my tape-recorder behind my cappuccino and out of her view, and continues talking.

In her 40s, with brown hair and a soft, even voice, she sometimes shivers when talking about her boss or the way her chest tightens when she thinks about speaking at a business meeting. Other times she beams, as she talks about how she can finally email someone a question without being shackled by the worry that all she will get in response is a “no.”

Five million Americans are affected by social anxiety disorder each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The American Psychiatric Association defines the disorder as an intense fear of a potential negative judgment, usually in a public situation.  Potential triggers could be anything from eating in public or using a public restroom, to talking to strangers or having sex.

The causes and severity of apprehension vary from individual to individual, but researcher Richard G. Heimberg, author of Social Phobia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Treatment, says that up to 13 percent of the population has some form of the disorder.

Many people are shy around those they don’t know, and get nervous when they have to speak in public. For those with social anxiety disorder, these feelings reach irrational levels. Their fears are so intense that they get nauseous while thinking of them and live unsatisfying lives in an effort to avoid them.

In Jeanne’s case, attacks revolved around dating, job interviews, speaking in public, talking to authority figures, and a myriad of other situations in which she could be looked down upon. She would frequently plan her life around avoiding her fears, often at the expense of her true desires, such as when she attended a college in the city with dreams of becoming a psychiatrist. The school wasn’t her ideal choice, but because an interview, or even a personal essay, was too frightening to consider, her options were limited.

Once enrolled, Jeanne realized that she couldn’t take upper-level psychology classes without giving presentations. Plus, her family didn’t really support the idea of her studying psychology in the first place, and she began to think that people she’d work with as a psychiatrist probably wouldn’t like her anyways. Eventually, she ended up in the history department.

Her problems continued after graduation, as Jeanne found herself terrified of changing situations, even ones that made her unhappy, for fear of new situations that could leave her exposed. She’s lived in the same apartment for 19 years, has had the same job for 9, and says she’s still “way too close” to the only boyfriend she’s ever had, even though they haven’t dated in decades. She can’t even get rid of the squash partner she dislikes for fear the new one will be worse.

“I have a hard time giving things up even if they’re negative,” she says. “It’s better to have something that’s mildly negative because the next thing might be extremely negative. It’s irrational.”

It’s not as though she’s never tried to get more out of life. But it always seemed that Jeanne’s anxiety triumphed over her ambition. She tried to get back into the health field four years ago, this time focusing on becoming a dietitian. Her beginners’ classes went well, so she then contacted nearby programs by email to inquire about taking advanced courses. When her emails weren’t answered, she gave up on the idea without attempting to call or drop by the places where the programs were offered.

Jeanne currently lives and does media work in a one-room, wooden-floor, white-wall apartment in Brooklyn, where her oversize couch doubles as a bed. She has to attend an occasional office meeting, filled with pushy talkers and irritable bosses who only want to hear good news. Just the idea of entering this melee is still enough to make her vaguely nauseous, but it is now much better than the overwhelming fear she once felt, before her recent breakthrough.

“If I thought I would have to speak … I would start to feel kind of a significant fluttering in my chest, what maybe people call butterflies,” she says. “And I’d probably get a bit of a stomach ache, and a bit of a headache, and my heart would start beating very hard. There’s a lot of tension and movement at the same time.”

When Jeanne would start to feel this way, she would find herself unable to focus and would just hope to get away without being noticed or, worse, forced to talk.

“You kind of feel frozen,” she says. According to Jeanne, social anxiety disorder can wear away a person’s self-esteem, and it can condition him or her to believe that it’s better to accept a current unhappy situation than to risk change. After two decades, she couldn’t talk to the men she liked and couldn’t imagine things ever getting better.

Ready to fail

Jeanne remembers she would often eat in the empty stairwell in high school because she was too worried to eat in the lunchroom. She never knew how to sit down and talk with groups of people, and even today, she has a hard time approaching two people who are talking to each other.

Memories of spending her childhood isolated made Jeanne decide that she could never put another person through this — Jeanne says it’s commonly believed but not proven that social anxiety is hereditary — so she decided that she would never have children. She changed her mind a few years later, but decided that it was too late for it to matter anyway.

For Jeanne, the insecurity reached beyond class and work into her personal relationships. The idea of dating once made Jeanne miserable. She’s has had only a handful of dates in the past few years and one long-term relationship. The anxiety had crushed her self-worth to the point that she assumed that if she liked someone, he couldn’t possibly like her. The only dates she could go on were with men she was uninterested in.

“I had so many fears about going on a date or dating … I didn’t even want to do it. I still don’t know anything about dating,” she says. “I feel like I’m 13 in dating situations.”

She found that sweets could temporarily make her calmer and more festive around her friends, and there were times when she combated her anxiety by eating to the point where she was too nauseous to be nervous. But the relief from her fear that food provided would never last very long.

Some of her fears make more sense than others. She hates traveling out of the city for family dinners every few months because her family has always criticized her — for everything from her weight to her shyness.

“They would say things like ‘she should have a Ph.D. by now, but she’s too shy,’” she says. “I was way too fat, I had too much acne, I was very disorganized, and the teasing about that was pretty constant. I really felt like no one in my family liked me, growing up.

“The current criticism is that … recently I’ve been told that my clothes aren’t good enough by my sister and my mother, and I just think that I’m too old to be told that,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with my clothes, and you shouldn’t tell that to anyone, really.”

But often, her worries have seemed ill-founded and self-defeating. In college, there were many times Jeanne thought she was incapable of handling an assignment, and then she became too anxious to study or to ask the professor for help. Although she had always done well in high school chemistry, she dropped out of a college chemistry class because she was worried that the teacher would give her a bad grade. She would procrastinate as much as possible; sometimes she would be so worried about her ability to write a good paper that she would be unable to finish her assignment, and thus she would receive a bad grade, which further enforced her fear and destroyed her self-esteem. 

“Before I realized it was social anxiety, I just thought ‘I’m a big loser,’” she says, “‘I can’t make a good speech. I can’t take a test and do well on it.’ I just didn’t really connect it to social anxiety until recently.”

Interrupting the talking in your head

As bad as it got, Jeanne was never completely alone, as several of her friends suffered from anxiety as well. For Jeanne, it just seemed natural that people slow to build trust and friendship would gravitate toward each other.

Jeanne and her friends knew that something wasn’t right about their shyness, and five years ago they began reading about social anxiety. But even though she knew what her condition was called, she didn’t know what to do about it. Jeanne tried to do some of the exercises mentioned in a book about cognitive behavior therapy — a branch of psychiatry dedicated to modifying harmful thoughts and behaviors — but they seemed too difficult, and once again, she was too discouraged to continue.

She continued to live a life where she never talked to the men she liked, never spoke at work, and never went for the things she wanted. It was hard, but it seemed harder to change.

Then, about a year ago, while searching online for information about anxiety, she discovered a research clinic at Columbia University that was studying, and developing a treatment for, the disorder. She took an online self-help test sponsored by the university clinic. Intrigued by the results, and sick of how she lived her life, she enrolled in the school’s study on social anxiety, and qualified for a free therapy program.

She was temporarily given Paxil to decrease her tension, and was taught how to recognize and break down the thoughts that were leading to her anxiety. She was taught to figure out what the core beliefs behind her fears were, and then to write out and explain her feelings when she began to feel overwhelmed. One of the core beliefs Jeanne learned to rationalize away was that her crush at the gym would never find her interesting enough to talk with.

“That’s going on in your head, so you can’t have a normal conversation,” she says. She learned to give herself encouragement that related to specific, immediate behavior goals, such as “even if he doesn’t have a crush on me too, we could have a good conversation. I’m fully capable of having a good conversation.”

The program lasted 16 weeks. She thinks she’s off to a good start. Sometimes it’s hard for her to make herself meet new people, but the exercises usually help her stay in control.

Jeanne was encouraged by the program to put herself in uncomfortable situations so she can learn how to rationalize her fears. One sign of her progress is that Jeanne’s been attending meet-up groups organized on the Internet, to force herself to interact with strangers. On one of her first outings, she went to a lecture about self-promotion for introverts. The theme of the leader’s speech had been that introverted people should just accept who they are and not bother to change how they do things. After the speech, 11 group members, including Jeanne (“sitting at a table is my most fearful spot, so the idea that I was able to is great for me”), met for dinner at a Korean restaurant and gathered around a long table. The leader asked the group what it thought.

Although talking at a table usually reminds Jeanne of cantankerous work meetings and strained family dinners — situations she would have fled in the past — she found herself speaking up. And even disagreeing.

“I just talked about how you can accept yourself,” she says, “but what if you’re intensely nervous or panicked … and it does require some kind of change?”

Jeanne was encouraged that the group accepted her even though she disagreed with it. She says that she was able to overcome her shyness because the setting was very relaxed. She later used the lessons of the treatment in a much more stressful situation.

Though Jeanne gets lonely working at home, it allows her to avoid her bosses, one of whom is often angry and critical. While in the office recently, a coworker dumped some of her excess work on Jeanne. She didn’t have the time to do it, she told Jeanne, and she shouldn’t have been assigned it in the first place.

This coworker had the assignment for six months without telling anyone that she couldn’t finish it, and it seemed unfair to Jeanne that she had to do the work now. But when she asked her bosses about it, they took the coworker’s side.

Jeanne was horrified. She felt that the bosses didn’t think much of her and that her job wasn’t secure. She tensed up and was unable to concentrate for the rest for the day. When she went home, she was able to write down and work through her reaction, and she eventually realized that the situation didn’t really directly affect her anyway.

“I might write … ‘she is acting to protect herself and look good to the bosses,’” she says. “‘It had nothing to do with you or your competence or self-worth.’”

Before she had learned to think through her problems rationally, Jeanne says she probably would have been panicking for at least a week.

“I’m thinking much more in reality now,” she says. “Yes, there are these negative assessments; you’re going to have to live with them, and this is what you can do about them now. Just go forward from here. That’s all I can do.”

Dealing with the no

Jeanne recently went to an upscale Meetup.com event at a lodge. She ended up being paired with a man through one of the event’s gimmicks, where players are assigned cards and have to find their match. Although Jeanne was anticipating having a good time, shortly after they began chatting, the man’s friends called him away in a “suspicious manner. He said he had to go talk to his friend for a moment and he’d be right back,” she says. “And then he never came back.

“In the past I would have kind of held onto that as a rejection instead of thinking that I wasn’t happy about it, but it was very clear that we weren’t clicking, so it’s not really a rejection,” she says. “So I could talk myself down in a couple hours.”

Another way she’s been pushing herself to be more active has been by emailing questions to her coworkers, telling family members when they are hurting her feelings, and taking the lead in seeing if her friends want to hang out.

“A year ago I wouldn’t ask any questions. I wouldn’t invite people out. I wouldn’t invite myself over because I was afraid of the ‘no,’” she says, “and now I do it. And of course if there’s a ‘no’ I don’t enjoy it, but its fine.”

One of her friends of almost 30 years describes the changes she has observed in Jeanne:
“It has been frustrating for me, because I cannot rationalize with her about her fears and insecurities, and I feel sorry for her because she seems needlessly worried and unhappy. [But now], she seems more open to meeting people, going to new places, and generally, making herself vulnerable. She has also become very capable of poking fun at herself, and seeing the humor and, even sometimes, the absurdity of her behavior.”

“I just wish I was Bill Clinton. I absolutely do,” Jeanne says. “I would be able to do anything and not be afraid of a negative assessment. Just ‘okay, if you don’t like me, you don’t like me.’”

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Blog

Second looks


For many people, December is a month full of cheer. But if you look beyond the surface of what seems to be December’s overarching narrative — Christmas, family, gifts, happiness, Santa — you’re likely to find people who are left out because they celebrate Kwanzaa or Channukah, or can’t afford presents for their children, or can’t afford to partake in the ritual of overeating. You might even discover that the chubby man in the red suit at the mall isn’t chubby at all — and doesn’t live in the North Pole.

In this month’s issue of InTheFray, we invite you to look beyond surface-level appearances. We begin with ITF books editor Amy Brozio-Andrews’ review of The Short Bus, Jonathan Mooney’s attempt to relate to children and adults who have been labeled as learning disabled. A severely-learning-disabled-student-turn-Ivy-League-graduate himself, Mooney illuminates “how students and adults labeled as learning disabled assert their own identities beyond established societal expectations.”

Meanwhile, Michael Tedder uncovers just how traumatic a simple greeting can be for the five million Americans who suffer from social anxiety disorder. And Activist’s Corner Editor Anja Tranovich reveals how defiant religious leaders can be when she interviews former nun and activist Lupe Anguianoabout pioneering efforts in welfare activism and the women’s rightsmovement and reframing religious debates to include social justiceissues.

In her photo essay "Shanti Shanti," Emily Anne Epstein visits India and discovers a place that is simultaneously unique and not all that different from the United States. And over in Morocco, American Sumayya Ahmed discovers the importance of visiting — and learns the how-to of being a guest. 

Back on U.S. soil, we turn to Obama and me, Leslie Minora’s humorous account of how campaign propaganda is inviting heartache as candidates try to wedge their ways into our lives. From there we consider Jacqueline Barba’s case for why newspapers should embrace narrative-style reporting as the onus of breaking news shifts to the Internet and 24-hour broadcast news.

Rounding out this month’s stories is Birgitta Jonsdottir’s essay, My mother’s journey in the belly of the Ladybug, which reveals how the author has used old and new rituals surrounding death to cope with the loss of her mother. In this multimedia tribute featuring a poem, a song sung by her mother, and a photo essay with a written essay, Jonsdottir makes new memories of her dead mother with the help of a ladybug box, her mother’s ashes, and an urn.

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Happy holidays!

Laura Nathan
Editor
Buffalo, New York

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Photo Essays

Shanti Shanti

prayer.jpg An attempt at silence.


 

I took these photos whilst in a group of college students, around 20 to not be exact, ranging in age from 18 to 25 with an even larger range in background. The daughter of the man who helped start the Somali Democratic League. The aspiring graphic designer son of Korean immigrants. The spoiled Indian daughter turned classical opera singer. The Playboy photographer’s daughter, the Brazilian grocer’s daughter, the gay hipster that tried so desperately to erase his origin and that one, the girl, the guy, the South African — so many perspectives. And then me, the Jewish, middle-class ball of optimism hoping to break herself out of her collegiate indoctrination, in three weeks, in 5 cities, in India.

They all took turns. Taking the same pictures. This is me in front of the Gateway to India. This is me in front of the Ellora Caves. This is me on the bus, all day, until I get out, for a few minutes, to take a picture myself, to complain about the food, to complain about the flies, to get back on the bus, to get back to the expensive hotel, to go to sleep, to begin again.

And so they talked amongst themselves, looked out the window and India passed them by. These new colonialists, traveling to far away lands, not for spices or jewels, but for photographs — days spent earning their own visages in front of architecture without understanding. Not seeing people, seeing Steve McCurry and Said’s Orientalism, buying, stealing it to bring back to their friends, to impress them with their wealth of imperialistic pictures. I was there. I took this photograph. My face in front of the Taj Mahal.

These photographs were my attempt at silence. I couldn’t believe what I had joined — a band of cultural ignorants. I wanted to see India, be swept up in her smells and dreams — read the paper, hear the people and I tried. This was the best I could do. Shanti Shanti. India is not a photograph.

[Click here to enter the visual essay.]

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Commentary

Obama and me

200712_obama.jpgThe feeling was mutual, when it came to getting fired up.


 

Barack Obama has come too close for comfort. I went to his rally for just one reason: to shoot an assignment for my photojournalism class. But when I saw him, my imagination began to take hold. I was struck by his sharp jawline and enrapturing white smile; I was smitten by his charming baby face and charismatic air.

As he looked out at the crowd, I swear our eyes met for a second. I told myself I was just imagining this momentous connection. But I know what I felt was real. I left the rally blinded by my own infatuation and knowing my feelings for him would likely go unrequited.

Then the following day there was an email from him in my inbox. It began: “I’m just leaving New York, and you’ve got me fired up.”

I thought I was the one getting fired up, but apparently the feeling was mutual. I saved his email in my inbox, but did not respond. I did not want him to think that I was that easy or to immediately set myself up for heartbreak. I resolved to play hard to get, so he would not lose interest.

A few days later he sent another email. This one addressed me by name and told me about his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The email also asked me to donate $25 to his campaign. This was a little off-putting; we had not even officially met, and he was already asking me for money? But I tried to ignore my initial frustration and reminded myself that, after only a brief encounter, I had already received two emails from Barack! Not even men I’ve dated have been this straightforward. I was charmed by his frankness, his apparent distaste for dating games. Flattered, I kept my emotions in check — and again did not respond.

But I secretly searched for him on MySpace. I sifted through a bunch of impersonators until I found his official profile. But instead of finding common interests in sports and music, as I had expected, I found: “Status: Married” and “Of all my life experiences, I am most proud of my wife Michelle and my daughters Malia and Sasha.”

Married? How could he do this to me? I felt as though someone had torn out my heart and thrown it against a wall. I’d dreamt of our dinners together in the White House and of knocking on the Oval Office door to see how his day has been. How could he be so heartless as to string me along like this?

I went for a long walk to clear my mind. When I came back, I looked at my computer again, hoping for answers. And there it was — yet another email from Barack. He addressed me as “Dear Leslie.” He still remembered my name!

This time he asked for $100, because he did not have as much money as Hillary Clinton.

“The bum!” I thought. “How could he be so brazen to call me his ‘dear’ and hit me up for money again?”

I was fired up all right, but this time with anger, thinking of his poor wife and kids, and how they would feel if they knew about his emails to me. Then I got an email from Kristina from Kansas, a regular voter like me, reinforcing Barack’s request for money. It was then that it struck me. Barack was not emailing only me; thousands of people must be feeling my same heartache. Our personal connections to Barack were all feigned. We were all prey of a heartless campaign monster.

This new revolution of campaign propaganda is getting much too close for comfort. The personal space between public figures and private business is closing way too fast, and the media we depend upon for personal communication are being invaded. We’re letting candidates move more deeply into our lives — and falsely into our hearts — than they should ever be allowed to come.

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Reviews

Riding toward new perceptions

200712_OTS.jpgJonathan Mooney chronicles his road trip in his book The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal.


Admit it — you see a short bus and you pretty much think you know the kind of kid who is riding in it. Jonathan Mooney is not your average short bus rider though — wait — maybe he is. As a child, Mooney, an Ivy League university graduate, was diagnosed as dyslexic and labeled a severely learning disabled student. As he grew up, he was taunted and teased, made to feel inferior and inadequate by teachers and school administrators, and struggled with his identity and with where he fit in.

Now an adult and still processing the childhood experiences in which he heard, directly or indirectly, again and again, that he wasn’t normal, Mooney decided to take a road trip — on the short bus, of course — to meet fellow children and adults negotiating similar terrain. He has chronicled his experiences in The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal.

In this cross-country jaunt, Mooney’s book goes beyond memoir/travelogue to include brief asides on the history and the current use of various labels. In the process, he explores what it means to be normal, to be different, and to fit in with our culture and our society.

To Mooney, even a label as innocuous-sounding as “learning disabled” is fraught with unspoken meaning and judgment, the impact of which might not be realized by many people: “The label ‘learning disabled’ may seem minor in a world full of labels, but in the context of normalcy and self-acceptance, it matters deeply. A kid who on every other level appears normal and could pass for normal is pulled out of the crowd and told, in essence, that he isn’t right, isn’t like everyone else.” It’s this message — which sets a child up for a pattern of failing to meet the cognitive expectations of the education system — that has long-lasting repercussions.

In Mooney’s opinion, placing the blame for shortcomings in academic achievement squarely on the shoulders of children and their parents deflects attention away from shortcomings in the accepted standard of intelligence and learning. Medicalizing variations in learning styles and abilities shunts parents’ attention to their child’s neurological defect or deficiency instead of allowing them to see the big picture: that perhaps the problem isn’t with their kid, but with the way our culture views intelligence.

Focusing on de facto case studies of a diverse group of people with cognitive differences, Mooney’s day-in-the-life observations are compassionate yet brutally honest — with himself and with his reader. He cuts himself no slack in admitting his own discomfort during his first impressions of Ashley, a deaf and blind child. He wonders at her ability to learn, believing that ability to be one of the primary criteria for defining what it means to be a valuable person, and finds she exceeds his expectations in more ways than one.

From troubled children whose educational needs are not being met by the school system, to adults who’ve never received a formal diagnosis of any kind but who live life according to their own rules, The Short Bus offers readers a close-up of how students and adults labeled as learning disabled assert their own identities beyond established societal expectations. For example, Mooney meets up with his old friend Kent, who was labeled as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but who managed to do a 24-hour comedy routine. This leads Mooney to ask the question: If the guy has no attention span, how could he do anything for 24 straight hours? Wouldn’t that indeed require a great deal of concentration and attention?

Mooney, also the coauthor of Learning Outside the Lines (Fireside, 2000), loses his narrative focus a bit about three-quarters of the way through the book, when he arrives in the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man Festival: “Here, I thought, I would let go of these old selves. But first, I had to experience being someone new, living without regard to the norms, for the next five days.”

But even in a place like Burning Man, there are norms; even in a society without rules, the community still self-organizes into a place with cliques and “cool kids,” much to Mooney’s surprise. “I felt increasingly desperate to fit in at Burning Man and it showed.” Mooney gets a Mohawk haircut and finds out what millions of women already know: A new haircut really amounts to no more than a new haircut; no matter how good it looks (or doesn’t look), you’re still the same person walking out of the salon that you were walking in.

“I had traveled all this way, only to find myself at the end of the tunnel, no different.” This one statement risks undoing all Mooney has done in his book up to that point — his rejection of the standard of normalcy, his advocacy that our culture increase its tolerance and understanding of cognitive differences and abilities. Here, Mooney is showing that he’s just as preoccupied with being normal as anyone else is — which is, ironically, totally normal.

The final stops on his short bus journey bring Mooney back full circle, helping him learn to expand his definition of normal, as his Uncle Bill put it, and leading him to affirm his identity as a short bus rider, on his own terms, once and for all. In the process, he leads readers to re-examine how they think of people with diverse abilities and the way we, as a society, treat them and allow them to be treated.

Mooney’s writing style is affable and easy, and pulls no punches, even when events paint him in a not-so-flattering light. His persuasive arguments prompt self-examination in the reader, and support new ways of thinking beyond the traditional education/intelligence standard. While I found the ending to be a bit flat, overall, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal is a powerful book that offers readers a road map for exploring our culture’s preconceived notions about abilities and labels.

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Commentary

Back to Basics

Best of In The Fray 2007. Why newspapers need to embrace narrative.


In its purest form, the newspaper was to serve as a city guardian. This was because the paper broke news. It informed and protected its constituency by imparting necessary fact.

Of course this isn’t print’s role any longer. Only the Internet and 24-hour broadcast news really break news now, faster and more cheaply. But newspapers have yet to adjust their role or articulate this shift. They continue to assume the obstinately objective, dispassionate voice of news breaker and to report facts that have already been reported elsewhere.

The combined effect of print’s inability to keep pace with today’s hard news cycle and its reluctance to abandon its official tone — even though it rarely delivers the latest word — has meant disaster for subscription dailies’ revenues. But — more importantly — in clinging to the old form, print journalists forego the chance to take up, at last, the greater journalistic tradition: the tradition of narrative news.

Narrative news is the retelling of real events with the intent to marry information to story, story being the artful rendering of events and the people who are part of them. Narrative is deliberate. Its structure, style, and voice are employed to reflect levels of meaning — social, psychological, historical — and to impart a sense of the greater significance of the action.

Narrative is a salable product for the simple fact that we live by it. We’re all always making sense of experience according to a story’s essential elements: continuity, character, and concept. H. Porter Abbott, a scholar of narrative, writes that narrative is “the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time”; that narrative gives us a sense of the shape of time, of our place in infinite space. In this respect, narrative is the essential element of human existence: It gives our lives meaning.

As such, it’s our inherent mode of comprehension and expression. Well-crafted narrative journalism demands the reader’s engagement; its structure and voice work to invest the reader in the page. Traditional methods of journalism preach the virtue of information and the plain language that delivers it: the maintenance of distance between journalist and reader, the antinarrative. But in attempting to distance themselves from their audience, journalists have only distanced the audience from their product.

This realization is not new, nor is the notion of including narrative in daily news. Many papers feature long-form news reports that editors habitually refer to as narrative. But to dress up any ordinary bit of journalism with superficial literary techniques — arbitrary metaphor, description, or wordplay — is not narrative. Nor is the insertion of a descriptive scene into an otherwise ordinary news piece. These are merely fast and facile attempts to disguise dull writing. But gussied-up inverted pyramids are only barely more appealing than un-gussied ones.

Were newspapers to attempt real narrative, the shift would require an investment in time. Such an investment is best suited to a newspaper, which can thrive on taking the time — a luxury that neither online nor broadcast news can afford. Because of its requisite slow carefulness, written narrative seems ill-suited to the web (read: print’s key competitor), which is fast-paced to a fault. And because the great appeal of the Web is its ability to display fragments of information and to deliver text in no predetermined sequence, that medium seems ill-suited to long-form story. The very concept of the nonlinear network conflicts with the nature of narrative, the basis of which is structured continuity. Story unfolds with deliberate intent, not in flashes.

Print journalists and publishers should take advantage of this media dissonance. Because straight information is base metal to narrative’s gem, it has evolved into a communal property, for which the public is ever less willing to pay. It will grow less salable over time, not only because its availability increases exponentially with the influx of new technology, but also because, as writing, it does little to engage its reader.

By contrast, narrative moves readers precisely because it embraces the communicative properties common to everyday conversation. Like conversational language, the language of narrative operates under established patterns: for example, the chronological structure of a story that is simply told. It draws upon common ideas and objects to evoke greater and yet-unseen ideas. And maybe most importantly, narrative, like spoken language, conveys something between people. It specifies its message to an audience through its tone, diction, frame of reference, and use of rich language.

People respond positively to these properties and are willing to pay for work that incorporates them because the writing feels real. Narrative is humanizing. It makes sense of our world. It echoes the ways we speak our own stories and the ways we relate to one another. It’s an ideal form through which to learn about our society.

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