I know I’ve been MIA for months now, but a lot has happened since my last post. I finally got a job, after an exhausting job-searching process, and my new position was a lot to take in the beginning.

I feel like I’m finally settling into this new life and hopefully, we’ll have more posts soon. In the meantime, here’s the long version of something I wrote on LinkedIn about my career journey after immigration:

Ten years ago I decided to quit journalism for good (or so I thought).

The decision to leave my career came alongside the decision to leave my country. It was 2015 and Brazil was (once again) deep in economic and political turmoil, with serious impacts in almost all sectors of the economy. The shock hit the already debilitated media industry hard, and the mass layoffs were spreading like wildfire through the newsrooms.

I had spent a decade working as a reporter in different media outlets, from radio to print, to online. And just like that, one evening in August 2016 I set foot in the newsroom for the last time. Four days later I was boarding a plane with a one-way ticket to Canada, to start everything anew.

The career transition was harder than I expected. I didn’t know how much of my identity was linked to being a journalist until I lost that. It was also hard to give up Portuguese as my work tool, and I felt like I couldn’t fit anywhere. I tried following the long line of ex-journalists filling up the ranks in Marketing or Public Relations agencies, but the route that seemed so easy to many of my former co-workers seemed like a dead end to me. I had absolutely no passion for those areas and that showed in the job interviews, since my poker face skills are basically nonexistent.

I often wondered if I had made the right choice, but didn’t feel like I could go back. But here’s the thing. They say you can leave journalism, but journalism doesn’t leave you. While I tried to navigate a possible career in other areas of communication, I felt the constant pull of this invisible string that tied me to this career. It was in the Instagram stories I created for my friends to explain the numbers of the pandemic. It was in the YouTube channels I created to teach people how to care for their house plants. And it was in the book reviews I wrote for this blog, exploring historical aspects of where the story was set.

And so I spent years in my little boat navigating the Canadian job market, trying to find another place to anchor my skills. Until the support of people in my professional circles gave me the space to try my luck with an old passion: data analysis.

I dived into this new possibility head first, and once I was able to pass the first barrier of technical skills, I saw myself, strangely, in familiar territory. After all, the work of a reporter is not that much different from the work of a data analyst. We’re both briefed to seek information. We both spend time collecting that information from different sources (be it a database or experts). And then we spend time cleaning it and transforming it to get to a final product that is simple enough for our audience to understand.

When I decided to pursue a career as a data analyst, however, the last thing I expected was that it would take me back to the place where I started — the newsroom. And yet, here I am.

It has only been a month, but the feeling of familiarity hit me as soon as I walked into the newsroom. It has been really interesting to see how much has changed (I almost miss the incessant phone-ringing) and how much has not (the drive to find that angle that no one has thought about yet). At the same time, working on the business side of things allows me to learn how much goes on behind the scenes of making a newspaper, especially in the digital age.

It’s wonderful to see how the Toronto Star, a newspaper founded in the late 1800s, has transitioned to the digital age. Watching the buzz and activity surrounding the SEO optimization for the website on election day (which was a huge success, btw), it makes me dizzy to think that this company is 133 years old.

A decade ago I left an environment that was mourning the death of journalism. Today I see that, although not perfect, journalism is pretty much alive, thank you very much. And that’s thanks to the effort of the passionate people who decided to stay and make it their mission to perpetuate and support good journalism. And now I’m thrilled to be back among their ranks.

So here’s to unexpected full circles, to the winding paths that lead us back home, and to the people who help us get there.

Read the previous episodes of this soup opera:

– Life These Days
– My Hiatus to Experience Double Grief
– Celebrating 3 Years in One Place