Farewell Column: Goodbye, DTH. Thanks for the ride.

My feelings about The Daily Tar Heel are complicated.

So complicated, I started writing this column a year ago and I still don’t know what to say. 

So, in true Adrian fashion, I’m letting music speak for me — otherwise, this’ll never get written.

This paper has taken up so much of the three years I’ve spent here. Afternoons I could have spent socializing or studying (or earning Fever points — I never did get that Duke ticket) were spent copyediting and fact-checking instead. Junior year, I had coworkers that I probably spent more time around than my roommates. All of them.

Do I resent that? Maybe a bit. 

There were days I came into the office freshly upset over some social opportunity I had to decline because of a schedule conflict, blasting “Get Over It” by OK Go in my headphones and hoping I would, in fact, get over it before someone asked me about my day.

Sometimes, always being busy in this one corner of the world even made me scared I was losing touch with my Blackness. 

The Daily Tar Heel has a complicated history with marginalized communities — one that it’s still working on and grappling with to this day — and years of fractured relationships between the paper and UNC’s Black Student Movement led to me questioning whether the paper was truly the place for me. There were nights I drove home listening to “Wesley’s Theory” or “i” by Kendrick Lamar and wondered: Am I where I’m supposed to be? Over time, I have found the answer is yes, but that answer was by no means easy to come by.

That being said, working here has also given me so, so, so much in return. 

Without The DTH, I wouldn’t have had this tight-knit family of journalists to lean on while navigating my emotions over the back-to-back August and September gun incidents on campus. Sitting in the office with people unified on a goal to help keep the campus and community informed and strong and Burna Boy’s freshly released “I Told Them” album were the only things stopping me from collapsing into a heap at the fall semester’s start.

If I was never at this newspaper, I can’t guarantee I would be in UNC Cypher. If I didn’t hear about the Rap Lab class from a coworker my sophomore year, I may have never joined the class and discovered the freestyling student group through a classmate’s invitation. As strange as it feels to say, I may have never gotten a chance to make songs of my own like “Bright” or “Disappearing” with people who are now lifelong friends if I hadn’t joined The DTH.

On top of all that, of course, there’s the music itself. Putting dozens of college students in a room together for hours on end guarantees you’ll hear some great music — some you know, some you’ve never heard of before. 

As a member of this newsroom, I’ve heard everything from Noah Kahan to Broadway tunes to Aaron May to yet-to-be-released Drake. Being around these weird and wonderful folks has led to some great moments: I’ve run into other editors at concerts, we’ve argued over new music releases and traded album recommendations. I only heard my favorite album of 2024 so far, Kenny Mason’s “9,” because Multimedia Managing Editor Carson Elm-Picard told me to check it out on a whim. 

At the end of the day, I have loved the vast majority of my three years at this paper. All the ups, downs, karaoke nights, Cook Out runs and InDesign errors came together to create a truly unique experience that couldn’t have been replicated anywhere else. 

And that, I guess, is worth it.

@kidplaysmusic

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com