I once got into my bathtub with my phone in my hand.

I wish I could say that this happened long, long ago, but it was much more recent than I would like to admit.

I absentmindedly entered the miniature pool of steaming water, my right hand plunging straight to the base of the white ceramic, my fingers snaked around the (now deceased) tiny communication device.

I destroyed another phone by falling through the ice on a frozen lake in the middle of the winter. My jeans froze to my legs on the walk back from my unexpected plunge. They literally froze. 

There have been many other deceased phones; it’s innumerable, really. These were just the more noteworthy accounts. Sorry, mom.

Having apparently lacked any kind of reserve for the livelihood of my cell phones, it makes one wonder about one’s ability to foster the care of things that hold value. Sometimes I think about having a kid one day – or a house. Then I remember the phones.

It should come as no surprise that I’m now in charge of a newspaper. I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but I think it has something do with having met really wonderful people, having seized some incredibly interesting opportunities, and definitely some luck.

Two and a half years ago, I walked into a tiny Lawrence Hall office that was splitting at the seams with young journalists. I guardedly took a pitch from the opinion’s desk about FAFSA regulations under the Obama administration. I stayed up the entire night the day before my story was due, obsessively reorganizing, rewording, refashioning.

I was nervous. I was new to the whole college thing, and having lived in rural West Virginia my whole life, I was new to the whole city thing. I was undoubtedly new to the whole journalism thing; my vision for my life was to be a fiction writer, and I had no idea what it meant to write a story about real people and places, not the ones I conceived in my imagination.

The Globe is the place where I discovered what a good story was. A multitudinous family of people taught me. They showed me how to turn a story over and over in the palm of my hand, like an object with an endless amount of sides – to see every story, every photo, as an opportunity to learn something about the world.

I used to think the best stories were the ones I found in the shadowed corners of dusty bookstores, with curling covers and fringed binding – filled to the brim with strange and interesting characters, harrowing escapes and heartbreaking romance.

The Globe is where I realized the best stories are the ones that you find right next door, at your office, in your class. The best stories are the ones that happen every day in real life.

Thanks to the Globe, I have grown an affection for this truth that is irreversible. It’s unquenchable. It will stay with me for the rest of my life. Thank you for sharing in this with me.

I am ridiculously humbled by the amount of driven and intelligent people I have access to on my staff. I am thankful for the people of the Globe, past and present, who have accepted me and my phone-breaking tendencies into their wild world of paper clips and red pens.

Here’s to trying to make it through this semester without breaking any phones.