What to Write?

I have always struggled with coming up with story ideas.  I mean, I can think of things. But I always have trouble deciding what's "important." I know the academic answer to that question: think about your audience, what is interesting to them?

But I also can't help but care about what's Important.  This weekend, I confronted that capital I.

On Friday night, I went to a dinner organized by a fancy English professor. He has degrees from what seems like every prestigious university, and he speaks like twenty languages, and he's so smart he thinks it's unnecessary to match his pants to his shirt. He's a nice guy, but his world is not really my cup of tea.  He is constantly trying to assemble a group of Very Important Students who will one day put a picture of him on their mantles because he helped make them Rich and Famous and Important.

My boyfriend is one of these people.  There is tension in our relationship over his desire to be one of these fancy people and part of this fancy world, and how squirmy I feel at that prospect.   But I'm also somewhat drawn to it.  I used to dream of becoming an English professor, attending a fancy graduate school and getting my fancy English graduate degree.  But those dreams slowly faded as I realized I'm bad at schmoozing and feel weird inside an academic cubby hole all the time.

The next morning, one of my journalism classes went on a bus tour of rougher parts of Durham.  We were hit with a litany of sad stories: people evicted from poor neighborhoods, hopeless but plucky efforts to turn it all around.  I know these things matter, and I care about them.  But I think I used to care more.  I'm starting to get numb to it.  I've been hearing the sad stories over and over.  I taught elementary schoolers with terrible home lives all summer, and volunteered in countless places before that.  There's a certain capacity for sadness and empathy, and I may be reaching it. I watched my my classmates see a sad person, instantly jot down contact information, and think "yes, that's sad and Important enough for an A!" 

So I am torn.  Is it okay to write about things that concern the people privileged enough that they don't really need any further coverage?  I sometimes feel guilty about my desire to expound upon the patriarchal cycles in The Awakening or about homosocial relationships and racism in Huckleberry Finn, because who really cares?  The furthest any writing on such literary, academic topics are going to go is into a dusty library or digital archive, where no one will ever care enough to search them out.  What does that contribute to the world? It doesn't often feel like much of anything.  But sometimes, that's what makes me happiest.

I brought this all up to my boyfriend when I got back from the bus tour.  He plowed into my occasionally-expressed desire to teach high school to satisfy my sense of privileged guilt.  I feel like I should use my UNC education to do something not entirely self-serving.  But he thinks that because me--just one person--cannot change the school system, I should take to my cubby and write about three hundred year old texts in isolation. I'm too idealistic.

But I feel so idealistic and so jaded at the same time.  And every single time I must think of a story topic (and in three journalism classes, this tends to happen quite a lot), I have this crisis of priorities and identity.  Perhaps I'm just overthinking the whole thing, and I should just write whatever seems interesting to me in the moment.

But I want to write the right things. To care about the right things.  So what am I supposed to write about?  Topics are hard.