Have you heard of Nellie Bly?
She was one of the most inspiring journalists ever to have lived.
Nellie Bly was in fact a pen name. When she was born in Pittsburgh in 1864 she was christened Elizabeth Jane Cochran. After her father died when she was fifteen, she and her mother and fourteen siblings were left with little money and so Bly went out to try and earn some.
At a time when women were a rare and actively discouraged sight in journalism, Bly managed to get a job for her local newspaper, earning five dollars a week. However, she was told she was to write only about domestic things like childcare and housework. Despite that, the popularity of her column allowed her to start writing in a more investigative way, and she moved onto meatier issues such as the impact of divorce laws on women.
In 1887 she moved to New York and managed to meet the famous newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. She wanted to work for his publication, New York World, but in a test of her commitment he said that her first piece would be an investigation into conditions at Blackwell’s Island Asylum, a notorious “lunatic” asylum for women. The catch was that Bly would need to go undercover. In other words, she would need to pretend to be insane and get committed there.
This was no easy task. She checked into a boarding house called Temporary Homes for Females and stayed up all night to give herself a drained and disheveled appearance. Then she put on a wild-eyed act of insanity, and—following psychiatric evaluation—was sent to the asylum.
There, she experienced and witnessed hellish conditions. Bullying staff. Mentally ill women tied up together with ropes. Rat-infested wards. Rotten food. Dirty drinking water. Shared bath water. Hard benches. Cruel punishments. One of the things she quickly noted was that many of the women didn’t seem insane at all yet were treated horrifically. Bly believed that a few hours of being there would test the mind of any sane person.
From the moment she arrived Bly dropped her act of insanity and acted as she normally would. Yet she noticed that every normal thing she did—like ask the staff if they had taken her pencil—was treated as further proof of insanity: “The more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be.” She also witnessed the most severely ill patients being actively provoked.
It was ten days before the New York World told the asylum the truth, and that their reporter should be released. It was a harrowing assignment. Yet by witnessing and writing about her experience, Bly helped shift the American public’s view of asylums and mental illness.
As a direct result of her two-part article “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” the state department in charge of the asylum had its budget raised by a million dollars. Even more impressive, her list of recommendations was taken on board by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, and this resulted in the closure of the asylum a few years later.
Nellie Bly became famous. And helped usher in a new age of intense, undercover journalism.
She went on to report all kinds of dramatic stories, a far cry from the kind of domestic fare she had initially been encouraged to write about in Pittsburgh. She covered everything from government corruption to baby-buying scandals.
In 1889 she became even more famous as the person who broke the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, when she embarked on a 24,900-mile trip around the globe and completed it in a whisker over seventy-two days. While on the trip she met Jules Vernes in Paris, visited a leper colony in China, and journeyed along the Suez Canal. She traveled on boats and trains and even the occasional donkey.
The remarkable thing is that even as other people were sent out to beat her, she refused to treat it as a race. And her reporting shows how much she appreciated every moment of beauty in her journey. “I always liked fog,” she wrote, “it lends such a soft, beautifying light to things that otherwise in the broad glare of day would be rude and commonplace.”
Years later, during the First World War, she became the first female reporter to visit the conflict zone between Serbia and Austria, and was even arrested—but quickly freed—when she was mistaken for a British spy.
Nowadays her legacy lives on, and she has had all kinds of things named after her: press awards, boats, an ice cream parlor, even an amusement park.
A testimony to what a human can do, armed with little more than a sharp pencil and a sharper mind.
As Bly herself put it, “Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.”
She had resisted every role society had wanted her to fit into and became who she wanted to be.
Mess
The hardest thing to be is yourself. We are so overloaded that we can’t always see the truth of who we are. We distract ourselves to distraction. Sometimes we clutter our lives deliberately to take our minds off the clutter inside our heads. When we take the external clutter away, we have to face the clutter inside ourselves. All the mess. And the more we focus on it, the more we see the order in it. There is a reason why everything is where it is. We might want to order the mess a different way, or we might feel the mess is perfectly fine. But we are imperfect because we are alive.
• • •
We are messy because the universe began with an explosion and the debris has drifted ever since. We are all messy mammals on a messy planet in a messy cosmos. To deny mess is to deny who we are. To see it, to allow it, to forgive it, is to reach a state of what Buddhist and psychologist Tara Brach calls “radical acceptance,” where we can appreciate our so-called flaws or imperfections as a natural part of existence. And then we can exist with openness and honesty, rather than shrink ourselves by trying to shut ourselves away like the contents of a cluttered cupboard. We can, in short, live.
Aim to be you
If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Cherish it. Love it. And don’t give a fuck if people mock you for it.
Cup
You have no control over who people think you are. So don’t worry. If they want to hate a fictional version of you that lives in their minds, let them. Don’t drain yourself trying to be understood by people who insist on not understanding you. Keep your cup full. Go to the kindness.
Pomegranate
Much of gossip is envy in disguise. Much of self-doubt is conformity in disguise. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. Breathe into you. Step out of the shade. Be you in the wide open. The only success that matters is the success of being who you are. Fitting in is fine. But never try and fit in if this fitting-in means becoming something you are not. Become you. Become the person no one else is. If people don’t like you, let them not like you. Not every fruit has to be an apple. It is too exhausting to spend this existence as someone else. If you are a pomegranate, be a pomegranate. Sure, there are probably more people who don’t like pomegranates than people who don’t like apples, but for those of us who like pomegranates they are what we like best.