New Ways: Reflecting on my time with The Daily
New Ways is a biweekly column from Sebastian Strawser ’29. In these installments, Strawser reflects on the pause of his Stanford education and ponders new ways to approach education, mental health and life itself.
I didn’t just send the first draft of this piece two weeks late. I very nearly didn’t write it in the first place. At first, I chalked it up to my community college classes picking up and balancing that with work. But when I finished most of my assignments days before I needed to, and therefore had more time on my hands, the desire to write this felt like a fading ember.
It felt very different from the flames that have long sustained my passionate writing for The Daily across its multiple sections. I even looked back to my past as a reporter — a time of late-night Faculty Senate pieces and diverse community coverage — and started to question my future with The Daily. It’s as if the times when a Daily staffer was quoted (long live the quoteboard) saying, “I want someone to love me as much as Sebastian loves The Daily” and I was recognized as “someone who is deeply passionate about journalism and The Daily” felt like they could never have been about me.
Recent reflections on my life trajectory made this Daily dissonance abundantly clear — and jarringly so. Before today, my name had appeared on the byline of 53 pieces. Before my leave from Stanford, it was 39. Though the frosh that I joined The Daily alongside in the fall of 2022 — the one-of-a-kind Class of 2026 staffers — are graduating this spring, my time with The Daily feels like a thing of the past despite the fact that I am literally writing for The Daily today.
Whenever you lose the heart for something you did with such love on the daily, that part of your soul atrophies like an inactive muscle. You almost forget that it was even there in the first place, and any attempts at reawakening it can feel like such a tiring experience. Admittedly, I’ve felt this not just with writing this piece but also as I wrote about community college success, institutional resistance and California’s recent re-districting proposition. As real as the writing burnout is, I realize that something had to change. As I think about my eventual return to Stanford and the part of me wanting to keep the advocacy in my writing alive, my very outlook on The Daily has to change.
I have to look back at some of my pieces and try hard to remember — even harder to truly internalize — what made them so special to begin with.
The first article I ever wrote for The Daily was a protest where over 200 members of the Stanford community called on the University to do better against sexual violence on campus. On a very personal level, it set me on a path to understand more of my identity as a survivor and what it means for me, as a bi man, to do good in this world.
I also co-wrote a piece about the Faculty Senate’s “nuclear option” motion to disregard the Undergraduate Senate and allow exam proctoring. This piece reminded me that, while not every fight is won in the end, students can disrupt the normal business of the University to get a response from those at the top.
Following my switch into Opinions, I’ve written in solidarity with Stanford’s creative writing lecturers, graduate workers and international students. These pieces, all of which are about groups that I’m not a part of, reminded me of the awe-inspiring diversity of the campus community that deserves our most unyielding support.
I eventually wrote a poem titled “Justice for the Other” that I’ve read a number of times to get in the right mindset for my sociology class. It reminded me to forever see the humanity in the so-called groomers, vermin and terrorists in society — to believe in justice for all of those that polite society wants to dehumanize.
The piece that I am most proud of is my magazine piece, “Stanford’s Democratic duty to combat the MAGA rage.” I devoted so much time and effort to researching the underlying, at times overlapping, societal mechanisms behind why the Nazi regime and Trump movement came to power. Each time I read that piece, I am once again reminded of the kinds of truths that the written word can and should illuminate.
That is what I lost sight of after all of this time away from campus. As the days became weeks, months and now almost two years, I forgot so much about the work, memories and people of The Daily that made it what it is. While my heart for the paper has started to atrophy, this recent reflection on my time with The Daily sets the record straight. Just as I thought about The Daily in a new light following my last big reflection on it, I’ve come around to a better understanding of it today.
The most likely outcome is that, when I resume my Stanford education, none of the staffers I’ve worked with before will still be with the paper. And that’s okay. From production nights coinciding with Taylor Swift album releases to late-night edits, I’ll still have a treasure trove of cherished memories to look back on. I am thankful for everyone, whether or not I’ve worked with them before, that makes The Daily the beating heart for campus storytelling, dialogue and creativity that it is (special shoutout to the three staffers who played Cards Against Humanity with me at On Call before I left campus).
So much about my life is up in the air right now. But much like life, death and taxes, the certainty of my love for The Daily persists — reawakened in this new chapter.
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