Thoughts on a Wednesday in November

Despite all the things going our way right now with the car being imported and passing inspections, I’m in a not so good phase, or whatever you should call it, right now. The past few weeks it has just really dawned on me what we’re trying to do here and no matter how I’ve tried to fight the pessimist thoughts, I have struggled to feel as confident as I did just a while back. I know Brian is a bit stressed about things as well, but doesn’t seem as worried as I am right now so he might think it’s weird that I post this. But we said from the start that we will share our ups and downs with you readers, so here it goes.

And trust me, planning a big project like this it would be odd if we never felt any worrying, fear o doubts. Because it can be kind of scary. Big decisions to be make, lots at stake, responsibilities and promises in a project where nothing is guaranteed to go the way you planned it to go.

As we went away on holiday a couple of weeks ago we knew that coming home meant being very close to finalizing the importing of the car. And once that was out of the way we could focus completely on actually getting this project rolling – getting sponsors.

And I think that’s why I’m nervous. It’s kind of starting now. For real.

I think we’ve been quite optimistic about the whole sponsorship thing, maybe a bit naive, who knows – only time will tell now that we get started. But I was drastically pulled back down to earth when doing some research the other day. I read advice from explorers who fund their journeys with sponsors and my optimism swiftly flew out the window. It was all “you don’t get sponsors if you haven’t done anything like this before, sponsors you get as you go and become experienced” and “you have to have something to offer them that is unique and that nobody else has done before” and “I know a guy who works at Canon and he gets 300 sponsorship applications a day and approves 1% of them yearly”.

Yay. How encouraging.

We can only hope that everything will work our way now, that we will in fact have something special to offer them, that people will see the potential in our project and that we have enough time and energy to hunt for sponsors before the date we’re hoping to leave.

I just realized… I’m probably also just “relapsing” a bit… I struggled a great lot with the whole sponsorship plan in the beginning of this project but slowly managed to get my head around it and accept it. But now that it is starting to happen for real I’m probably just stressing about it again. Maybe that’s what this sudden pessimism curve is about?

The reason for that is that as a journalist I’m obviously not supposed to take money from anyone. You just don’t. Ever. So this is something that kept me awake at night in the beginning. I didn’t want to risk my credibility and reputation as a journalist but I knew we couldn’t make this trip happen without the help from sponsors.

I went and asked for some advice from more experienced journalists and together we came to the conclusion that it doesn’t have to be a big problem. The sponsorships obviously can’t have any affect on my journalistic work. But I was told nobody is likely to be surprised that we have sponsors for a project like this. So I felt quite a bit better after these meetings.

There is obviously a solid line between the funding of the trip and the journalistic work that I will be doing, I guess I just struggle with the idea still because being a journalist is something that you are 24/7. It’s not a role you step into for a job and then step out of, and can act however you want in your sparetime. No matter how I look at it I don’t feel 100% comfortable with having sponsors. I guess I’ll just have to put up with the stomach ache, see it for what it is – a good thing, it means I have a high journalistic moral – and just make sure to never ever let that solid line go wayawayaring.