To The Badger Herald,

First of all, you have no money. Second, you smell funny, the wifi is down and you never, ever let me sleep.

But it has been so beautiful to lie awake with you.

The University of Wisconsin has tested my strength time and again. It has been many days I watched students and administration silence and demean the people closest to me, and many nights I held my knees to my chest, wondering how the hell this place would ever feel like any semblance of home. Sometimes, I fear this university turned me cold.

Very few spaces have brought me warmth. Fewer have healed me.

I’m not in the business of rose-tinted glasses when I can help it, or romanticizing the moments which have truly, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, sucked. The bathroom bears witness to weepy students balancing full course loads, real-money jobs and something resembling a healthy sleeping pattern, atop the dozens of hours of work this place demands.

At times, I’ve been there. Other times, I’ve sent someone there, biting my lip to suppress an instinctive apology, forcing myself to remember that brilliant people sometimes need to hurt each other to produce the best possible final product.

Love is weird. All I know is I’m writing this from the floor of the hallway at 2:40 a.m. and I can hear my editor-in-chief and fellow managing editor exporting ArtsEtc pages for the last time. Teymour is behind on his final papers and worked a real-money job until he could come in tonight. When we leave, Alice will put down another coffee and crank out her final presentation, due tomorrow. Henry, our features editor, is singing in the bathroom. It seems it’s a song he conjured up three minutes ago — he’s rhyming Jeremy with Jeremy — and I wonder if he still doesn’t know how thin the walls are. The copy chiefs, Peyton and Vidushi, are doing …  something related to Peyton’s feature, I’m really not sure what. I doubt whatever it is was assigned to them. They could both go home if they wanted.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We could all go home if we wanted.

Yet we never do. Somehow, while cussing out InDesign, shouting at white boys about white boys, frantically Slacking #news and panic-ordering Jimmy Johns, it just … I don’t know. You can’t leave to go home if you’re already there.

I don’t study journalism. I do love to write and tell stories. I believe in this organization, telling the truth and holding people accountable. When I started here, there were approximately five people of color working in news media at this university, and that’s never been OK with me, and I will always call on The Herald — among all others — to do better. So if you want to know what brought me here, that’s the long and short of it.

But that’s not what kept me here. Not because it became less important but frankly because this is too damn hard. None of us are that noble. So if you catch one of my coworkers claiming they stick around because of loyalty to journalism, it’s fake news.

Alice’s first laugh after three hours of dead silence early on a Tuesday morning when she noticed sports was spelled sprotz in Dropbox kept me here. Actually, all of her laughs kept me here.

Watching Emily and Teymour’s eyes light up on the first note of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and singing, spinning and holding each other all at once as though their lives depended on it kept me here. Billy pulling up with McDonalds in his Jeep kept me here. No one loves their friends like Billy does.

The Badger Herald is a secret. No resume will allow us to share how damn hard we worked here, giving it everything we had and straining for all we didn’t. A part of me will always believe it wasn’t for the paper so much as for one other.

It feels amazing to make you proud.

Alice, you are a woman none of us deserve. Unparalleled leadership and wisdom beyond one’s years are not enough to do this, though you have both. At the end, it takes an immense love for others, beyond love for oneself. I love you enough for the both of us. Teymour, you are a man, so you’ve got that working against you. But if I could have a quarter of the integrity and loyalty you have, I’d be better for it.

I know my power because of you. It never felt like it at the time, but every night that weighed on my bones, every board meeting that went an hour overtime, made me stronger. I know how capable, talented, tenacious I can be when supported by the right people.

I’ll take out a key card someday, in a city far from here, and pause for a fraction of a second, overtaken by a memory of holding my backpack in my teeth, swiping the key card to 152 W. Johnson with one hand and gripping a stack of newspapers that not one of these damn kids could have grabbed on their way up with the other.

I’ll think of you in the moments I forget my strength.

I’ll think of you when new coworkers piss me off and it’s nothing compared to how much you pissed me off.

I’ll think of you when they show me love and I remember it’s nothing compared to how much you loved me.

Anyway, this is hitting a thousand words. I could probably cut something but whatever, too late to fire me now, Alice. One last thing.

Matt, Peyton and Lucas. On your progress as journalists and leaders, your work speaks for itself. I mostly need you to know that watching you grow as the beautiful, compassionate, inventive, brilliant humans you are has been the joy of my management tenure. Hold onto one another. No matter how it looks, when it comes down to who will do it all for you, it really, really be your own managing editor.

Thank you for letting me be yours.

@channel Until we meet again.