A Psychologist After All

I scoffed. At the time I wanted to become a psychologist; I was fascinated by the ways people grow into what they become. In my limited adolescent worldview, journalists were those brash, aggressive types who chased politicians up the steps of the Capitol, yelling, “Senator, can you comment?” I’m no political animal and definitely not the pushy type.

Years later, having turned into the quintessential Jewish dropout (I quit my PhD program in psychology), and gotten the last of my children into school, I had a lot of ideas knocking around in my head. I penned a few articles and sent them off. They were published in places like Horizons and the Jewish Observer, zichronam livrachah. One thing led to another, and before long I started getting requests to write features. When an editor I’d been working with moved to a position at Mishpacha, I followed.

My first Mishpacha assignment came in 2007 — and the magazine has gone through a face-lift and some major changes in those 12 years. Back then, we ran more features and many fewer columns, Blackberries were the height of high tech, and attention spans hadn’t yet been decimated by WhatsApp and YouTube.

I came to journalism from an academic background, trained to research topics exhaustively. I would dive into a subject head-first, read books, pull up old articles. Eventually we shortened our word counts and I learned to bite off smaller pieces, and to write shorter and snappier (as befits a weekly magazine, as opposed to a dissertation).