Let Me Tell You A Story About My Mentor

When I got accepted to college, I often daydreamed about my first day on campus. I imagined the swirl of what I’d feel: anxious, excited, overwhelmed. But when the autumn afternoon actually arrived, I only felt one thing – numb. That was because my beloved father had died three weeks prior.

During orientation week and the first months of classes, I discovered an urge to rebel against my peers reveling in the freedom and exhilaration of college. I woke before dawn to run along the lake and stayed up till heavy-eyed hours to memorize vocab words from my textbooks. In hindsight, I realize my vow against partying was because my dad’s illness had made me confront the chilling reality of time. I’d caught him crying silently for days straight as he came to terms with the experiences he never would get to have. With that memory raw in my mind, I was hypersensitive to not wanting to spend time doing anything that didn’t fill me with purpose and joy.

My journalism school was my haven on the days when grieving left me exhausted. When I walked into award-winning investigative producer Mark LaMet’s Multimedia Storytelling journalism class during winter quarter of that first year, I felt the fog around me start to lift. He often started class by sharing surges of spell-binding stories from the journalism industry, current events, and beyond. You could not turn away. Absorbing information at rapid-speed gave my mind a couple-hour break from missing my dad.

But in one class, I pitched a story around my grief. Mr. LaMet caught up with me afterward and told me that this was a big deal. Losing my dad was a big deal. He shared his own experiences with loss – never telling me how I should feel – just sharing stories that made the isolation I was feeling dissipate. The time in class became my anchor. I found comfort in his personal anecdotes and creative intoxication in the class lessons around crafting narratives; I knew all I wanted to do in my life was tell stories that impacted others too.

I owe it to Mr. LaMet for seeding my love of photojournalism, my fear of not reading the news every day. Throughout the rest of my years at Northwestern, he saved packets of magazine and newspaper clippings for me on subjects of interest, we’d discuss every topic imaginable, and he’d always tell me to “hang in there.”

After I graduated with my journalism degree and moved out West, Mr. LaMet and I continued to keep in touch every few weeks. His emails made me laugh, cry, cringe. They used bold and italics and colors, they ran 20 paragraphs long. They told me I was good enough. They told me not to settle. They sometimes told me to take a breath. They told me to hang in there. One of the most powerful messages he shared with me, that buoyed me: “Listen to your heart but run it by your head. If your heart can’t admit it doesn’t fit but your head knows it doesn’t fit: IT DOESN’T FIT.”

Since Mr. LaMet came into my life, he has filled and expanded my world with raw advice, fascinating and frightening facts, inspiring lessons – all shared through story. I know it is thanks to him that the emotional numbness from my grief has slowly burned off; when I arrived on campus for my first day of work at Stanford Graduate School of Business to help tell stories via our digital channels, I felt anxious, excited, overwhelmed – and grateful. Every single day I am grateful that Mr. LaMet is my mentor, my adopted dad. He just fits.