Charles M. Blow My Farewell Column Feb. 5, 2025 [View all]

[elleng]

I never wanted to be a writer. I was an information designer. Becoming a columnist, like so many things in my career, was a bit of a fluke.

As I end this column, I’d like to share the strange way that it began. . .

That was until 2009, when I wrote about two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts, the other in Georgia, who had hanged themselves just 10 days apart after both had endured homophobic bullying.

I knew what it was like to be a little boy suffering through that kind of bullying. I knew how it felt to consider suicide as a way out, with a small hand clutching a bottle of pills. I knew the darkness and the loneliness.

I had thought about those feelings for so many years that the words I used to describe them had been compacted into poetry. . .

In writing about those boys I found my voice. It was rooted in writing about the things I knew most intimately. I had to stop writing to sound as if I belonged on the page — a form of mimicry that for me was artificial — and start writing from soul memories and life experience, from the point of view of the vulnerable, the poor, the lost, the other.'>

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/writing-journalism-coming-out.html