“The NDP has the best track record in Canada for balanced budgets,” said Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the NDP, during the Munk Debate on Foreign Policy. A few people chuckle. “Oh, you’re right,” he paused. “I forgot I was in Toronto. There was one exception but it turned out Bob Rae was a Liberal.” Roy Thomson Hall echoes with the loudest laughter I’ve heard all night, but I don’t know why.

I make a mental note to Google “Bob Rae Liberal NDP” when all the bankers and businessmen can’t see me use my phone. By the end of the night, I’ve made lots of mental notes. I start to feel like I don’t deserve to be here, like my seat should have gone to someone who can laugh with the crowd for real—and not for the first or last time.

I came to Canada in 2008 to study at the University of Toronto. I was 18 and held an Egyptian passport, though I’d spent the previous 12 years living in the United Arab Emirates. Ever since, I’ve faced a barrage of unknowns from the social (why do people talk about the weather so much) to the practical (navigating the health care system).

I like to think I understand most of these areas now, but when I started journalism school in 2014, I realized there was a lot more I had to learn about Canada. On the first day of class, I was assigned a Toronto ward to cover throughout the municipal elections. I listened intently, then panicked all the way home. What’s a ward? Is it an electoral district? Why do they have different borders from a riding? I flipped through Discover Canada—a 68-page booklet of photos and facts that permanent residents receive to study for their citizenship tests. The word “ward” didn’t appear once.

I’m not the only one to go through this experience. Kate Sheridan is a freelance journalist who moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 2010. “You want to learn as much as you can but you don’t have the benefit of having these civics courses or the basic history courses that Canadians get in school,” she says. Another journalist, Mahnoor Yawar, moved to Toronto in 2014 from the United Arab Emirates to study journalism at Humber College. She’d already spent some time covering pop culture and technology in Pakistan, but wanted to cover crime, politics and other beats. There was a lot she didn’t know. “Honestly speaking,” she says, “I landed here knowing not much more than that Harper was prime minister.”

One of the first stories Yawar covered was Toronto’s 2014 municipal election. She spent many more hours reading and researching than her peers did. By the end of it, she was confident, but there was still unspoken context that no amount of reading would give her. “There’s always going to be that gap of what do things mean in context,” she says.

Even when I’m socializing with other journalists, I find myself lost amid the name-dropping. I just nod. Things became less funny when I started working on a story that required understanding Canadian television journalism. I didn’t grow up watching CBC or Global News; I grew up watching the five o’clock news in Cairo, and later, BBC.

I had no idea where to start, paralyzed by how much I didn’t know. I asked a journalism instructor if she could recommend books about the history of Canadian broadcasting? Instead, she put me in touch with a former television producer. Over an hour-long coffee, he gave me a rundown of everything I needed to know including the significance of news personalities and how television had changed over the years. I left with my head buzzing. I was lucky to get help, but I was still behind on my story. And asking for help from editors can be risky. Wouldn’t they just prefer to assign the story to someone who knows more?

I became a Canadian citizen just over a year ago, but the imposter syndrome lingers. I’m uneasy about my future in the industry. There are enough barriers without also worrying about asking stupid questions. (“What’s a classroom portable?” or “Why is this Canada versus Russia hockey game such a big deal?”).

The good news is there are some advantages. Sheridan, for example, has been able to avoid certain traps like regional and provincial biases. And, eventually, you end up learning more about current affairs than some non-journalist Canadians.

My friends tell me that Heritage Minutes are much more informative than Discover Canada, so I won’t be reaching for that book any time soon. As difficult, perplexing and embarrassing as it might be, I became a journalist because I like learning about experiences outside of my own—and the best way to learn about my new home is to keep being a journalist.

“You’re going to court,” my editor told me on my second day as a National Post intern. “You need to leave now.” I was all nerves as I threw my recorder and notebook into my shiny, black purse and sprinted to the elevator. I was off to the sentencing of wannabe Toronto rap star and convicted killer Mark Moore. Christie Blatchford had been covering the case, but she was out of town on assignment, and I was the undeserving—but lucky—available person. As the elevator slowly dropped to ground level, I became consumed with anxiety knowing that Blatchford would likely read the piece. I scanned my outfit: a pleated, cream-coloured sleeveless blouse, a pair of fitted, cropped black pants and two-toned, leather-heeled sandals. Despite my panic, I felt confident about my choices; I looked put together. I’d spent the previous night picking out an outfit to convey that I took my stint at the Post seriously. My degree in fashion helped me realize that my personal style allows me to assert poise. Dressing well is as important as showing up to work on time. As the elevator doors opened, I took a deep breath. “As long as you look like you know what you’re doing,” I told myself, “people will think you do.”

The next day, senior writer Peter Kuitenbrouwer visited me at my desk. He was holding the paper, opened to my court story on A3—my first byline for the Post. “Nice work,” he said. “But I think you meant to write ‘peace’ instead of ‘piece.’” My confidence sank, but I adjusted my handcrafted necklace—a reflex I assumed was the female equivalent of straightening a tie—and thanked him.

The ability to convey confidence through clothing is something freelance writer Rea McNamara knows a thing or two about. During times of uncertainty, the former style columnist “glamouflages.” One time, when she felt particularly challenged, she wore red lipstick every day for a week. “I just needed to feel confident,” she says. “And if I didn’t feel confident on the inside, I needed to project that I had my shit together.”

I, too, like to glamouflage. Dressing up gives me an instant boost and makes me feel like I have control—even if I don’t. The way you present yourself sends the outside world a message. “Your sense of style,” says McNamara, “should be reflective of the life you lead.”

We construct identities as we select pieces of clothing. “When you make these conscious decisions about your own personal aesthetics, it feels like you have a sharper take on the world around you,” says Shawn Micallef, co-owner of Spacing and a dapper dresser known for his bow ties. He understands the powerful relationship between clothing and confidence and gets a kick when he leaves the house dressed up. Yet, when working at home, the stylish journalist dresses “terribly.” Unlike Gay Talese, who worked from home dressed to the nines, Micallef doesn’t need a uniform to be productive.

Talese’s style became part of his identity as a journalist. In Rachel Tashjian’s 2015 Vanity Fair article, Talese credits getting his first job at The New York Times to the three-piece suit he wore to the interview. “I was polite, well-dressed,” he said. “I just know, though I never got any confirmation, that I made a good impression.” Tashjian also notes how Talese’s obsession with clothing intertwines with his writing. “When I write stories, it’s like making a suit: the pieces hang together, and you sketch,” Talese said. “The whole process: handwork.”

An effortlessly cool persona makes Joan Didion a style icon in and out of literary circles. French fashion house Céline made her the face of its spring 2015 campaign. “Didion might be the ultimate Céline woman: brilliant, creative, vaguely recalcitrant,” Vogue wrote. She kept a detailed packing list—which included two skirts, cigarettes, a mohair throw and a typewriter—taped inside her closet. “The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do,” Didion wrote. “Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture.”

While some writers want to blend in, others stand out. Tom Wolfe’s uniform—his legendary white suit—became synonymous with his work. “Wherever he went, he was the outsider,” Micallef says. “Everyone knew he was the writer.”

During my last week at the Post, I wore gold-stained leather clogs I bought at a flea market after bargaining with a vendor for 20 minutes. Each time I slipped into them and reflected on the victorious price adjustment, they gave me confidence. As the heavy carved heel of the wooden soles hit the newsroom tile, I passed Kuitenbrouwer. “Nice shoes!” he said. I smiled, satisfied that he’d complimented my writing—and my footwear.

As a journalist of colour, I find few things as disheartening as an editor replacing “Black people” with “black people.” This first happened to my work with an essay about the racism I experienced while dating as a Black woman in London, Ontario. I was overjoyed when the piece appeared— until I saw that all of my capital-B “Blacks” had become sad, irrelevant “blacks,” except for the two that were in quotation marks.

I was devastated that a news outlet claiming to have fresh, bold ideas—including sections specifically for people of colour to contribute—chose rigid grammar rules over expression. With every “B” on the page, I was asking for Black people to be heard; instead, I felt silenced. Since then, I’ve lost almost every battle for the capital “B.”

Capitalizing proper titles for Black people has been on activist and journalist agendas for decades. For me, in the era of Black Lives Matter, capital-B Black is an act of defiance against a society that often paints minorities as secondary. That inferiority nags at me when I’m called a racial slur; when I’m forced onto the road because a group of white kids see me and won’t share the sidewalk; when a security guard follows me around a store. Trying to explain to your (often) white editor that Black is so closely tied to your own lived experience can be complicated and emotional. I’ve heard “I just don’t get it” too many times. But when the profession meant to expose systemic issues doesn’t “get it,” that becomes yet another barrier.

One of the earliest capitalizing champions was W.E.B. Du Bois, an American author and activist who started a letter-writing campaign in the 1920s. He demanded that publishers and newspaper editors capitalize the “N” in Negro, the official term for Black people at the time, to show respect. In 1929, Encyclopedia Britannica lowercased “negro” in Du Bois’s article prior to its publication. He wrote to the editor’s assistant, saying, “The use of a small letter for the name of twelve million Americans…[is] a personal insult.” Soon after, the encyclopedia restored the capitalization for the final version, and by 1930, The New York Times added it to its style guide.

No mainstream news outlets in Canada capitalize Black, and neither do most news sites such as BuzzFeed or Vice. The Canadian Press Stylebook says to “capitalize the proper names of nationalities, peoples, races, tribes,” such as Aboriginal Peoples, Arab, Caucasian, Negro and Pygmy, but “write aboriginal…black, brown, [and] white.” James McCarten, editor of the CP Stylebook and Caps and Spelling, says that editors, bureau chiefs and staff members have discussed capitalizing Aboriginal, but Black falls under another broader style policy. “Black is not a race. Nor is white,” he says. “Both are generic terms and therefore are lower case. We are not currently considering a change in that regard.”

Anthony Collins, co-chair of the Toronto Star’s style committee, says the paper follows Canadian Press style and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, which does not capitalize Black. While Collins says the Star has made strides with language around sexual orientation, disability and race in general, the conversation about Black hasn’t happened. “Language has power, and capitalizing words can be seen as a mark of respect,” he says. “But our chief goal as editors is to serve the reader, and in doing so, we are guided by established English usage.”

Some Canadian publications such as This Magazine have decided to start capitalizing. This year, the Review began capitalizing Black, Aboriginal and Indigenous after the masthead agreed it was a necessary step toward more accurate and respectful reporting on under-represented communities. Rabble.ca capitalizes Black “to acknowledge there is a shared Black experience that is larger than just sharing a similar skin tone,” says blog editor Michael Stewart. “It has cultural, social and political implications.” He adds that the Black and Indigenous writers he’s spoken to prefer the words to be capitalized. “We respect a community’s right to choose the way it describes itself.”

But that doesn’t mean all Black journalists are pro-capital “B.” CBC anchor Asha Tomlinson is torn: while she sees the distinction it can give, she thinks journalists should seek out where their sources are actually from. “Black and white have no origins,” she says. However, she notes that while the Black population in the United States is predominantly African-American, Canada’s is so diverse that journalists need an umbrella term when reporting on Black communities.

Style guides evolve, as does language. If we can change “E-mail” to “email” and take the “ed” out of “transgendered,” we can capitalize one letter to reflect the way a community identifies. Gangbangers, drug dealers, violent brutes—Black people have been victims of damaging stereotypes for years. After decades of non-Black folks telling us who they think we are, it’s time we get to decide how we want to identify.

As journalists, we have tremendous power in shaping how people see each other and, with that, a responsibility to get it right. We don’t get to call ourselves “progressive” if we’re unwilling to modify a community’s name just because it’s not in the dictionary. We should all know that black is a colour, but Black is for people.

“You’ll love this story,” Mary Gordon tells me. We’re sitting in her Toronto office and I’m interviewing her about the program she started. Called Roots of Empathy, it sends instructors into classrooms to teach children how to understand each other. She tells me about a man who recently contacted her to say that after taking one of her sessions as a boy, he realized he was a bully. Now a teacher, he tries to prevent others from acting the way he did. Gordon thinks I’ll enjoy this tale because she’s found me out: I used to be a teacher—not that I was planning on telling her that when I walked in.

When I had asked her questions only someone who had studied the education curriculum would know, she seemed impressed. So I had to admit: “Well, I used to be a teacher.” It seemed irrelevant; it was another life that had nothing to do with my current one. I wanted to do my job as a journalist—not bang out my past for a stranger, as I’ve done hundreds of times. Gordon didn’t ask me any of this, though; she was just happy she could speak to me as a peer. And I realized that my past career could help in my current work.

Life experiences, professional or not, allow journalists to insert themselves and their knowledge directly into their stories. But this comes with positives and negatives: knowledge is helpful, but avoiding bias is a challenge.

We trust certain journalists as experts because of their previous professions. Author and journalist Michael Lewis, famous for books such as The Big Short, Moneyball and The Blind Side (all of which have been made into major motion pictures), was a bond salesman. “Twenty five years ago,” he wrote in New Republic, “I quit a job on Wall Street to write a book about Wall Street.” Meanwhile, Vanity Fair correspondent William Langewiesche, a former professional pilot, writes about airplane crashes from the perspective of a journalist. He looks at the lives of the people while using his aviation background to explain what happened and the technology involved.

Sharing her experiences is something Deborah Reid, who worked as a chef for 26 years, believes is an important part of her work as a writer. She has a particular interest in women who work in professional kitchens. For an essay on the sexism of the chef uniform, which is made to fit men, she interviewed three women—but much of her knowledge came from her own experience. “At first, that was just fine by me…I didn’t want to be different.” she wrote. Later, though, Reid realized she was abandoning her gender in an effort to maintain her status as a chef.

But being too close to a subject can also make writing more difficult. Journalists’ views can cloud the way they write or speak about a topic. That was another worry I had in the Gordon interview. I wanted to hear about her program and think about it critically, not let my biases throw me off. I needed to listen to her plan and decide, as an outsider, if it was viable, without getting pulled into what I wanted to believe as a teacher: that teaching empathy is possible. I had to evaluate, as a journalist, if it really was.

Lisa Bendall, who worked in the disability field for many years before going into journalism and whose husband lives with a disability, believes writing what you know has its “challenges and its upsides.” Although her background gives her credibility with sources, the desire to protect her expert status means she needs more control over the final product. She says, “The last thing you want to do is see your article in print and there is some horrific insertion that I would never want to be associated with.”

By the time my article came out in This magazine, I couldn’t remember why I thought it was so important not to reveal my background to my sources. Gordon had told me it was helpful to know I was a teacher. “That, to me, is a bonus in anyone who is interviewing me, that I feel that we are on the same human path,” she said. She shares information about her program differently depending on who’s asking.

The headline was “In their shoes,” based on an anecdote I included in the story. A teacher I worked with printed out illustrations of shoes and had kids step onto one another’s when there was a conflict. I hoped such real-life details gave the story credibility, as well as emotional power.

Leigh Stein’s boyfriend Jason threw her against the refrigerator and didn’t believe she was hurt until she showed him the bruises. They had moved to New Mexico together so she could write her book while he worked—it was the most romantic plan she had ever heard. She recounted her relationship in a BuzzFeed story about how she investigated Jason’s arrest for a stabbing incident 11 days before his death in a motorcycle accident. “I thought I’d be able to draw a clear, straight line between our visit, his crime and the accident,” she wrote, “and then the story of our lives together would finally make sense.” In the comments section, many women shared their own stories of abuse.

Stein’s story is evidence that personal journalism, which is increasingly accessible online, allows writers to explore important topics such as mental health and domestic violence in a way that has a powerful effect on readers. They’re like getting hooked on someone else’s pain. While critics of first-person narratives say they are self-indulgent and get published only when they tell a painful story, the articles resonate with readers.

Personal journalism has always been around, says BuzzFeed Canada’s Lauren Strapagiel, but the difference now is that there is so much more content out there—people can always find an experience that speaks to them. “People are going to ask for it and go looking for it, and people are going to write to meet that need.”

In an August Vice story about surviving Hurricane Katrina and living with the guilt, Megan Koester took readers through her evacuation to the present, describing how lucky she is compared to those who didn’t escape. A January piece on The Huffington Post blog by Abby King was written in the form of an apology to her children for divorcing their father: “I will forever feel guilty that we broke your home and world apart.”

These articles give readers going through the same experiences validation by showing that other people feel the same way. “On a fundamental level, we connect with stories that have a strong human component,” says Craig Silverman, Buzzfeed Canada’s editor. “From a strategic perspective, first-person stories can do well online—people share them if it’s an experience that they can relate to.”

The Huffington Post opened a Canadian office in 2011, and blog, which publishes many first-person pieces, now has 5,000 contributors. Blogs editor Sadiya Ansari says the posts contribute to the public conversation from the perspective of an individual. Although personal narratives are found most notably on the Living and Parents pages, they are in every section—even on the Business page. A tale of a woman’s miscarriage on Huffpost Parents attracted a lot of readers, and Ansari can see why: “It’s very powerful in first person because it wasn’t about what miscarriage looks like from the outside.”

But some people see these pieces as self-indulgent and an easy out for writers. Janice Tibbetts, a journalism instructor at Carleton University, says she has nothing against first-person narratives and doesn’t call herself a critic of them, but doesn’t see much growth in them for a journalist. “It’s the kind of thing I don’t see as a skill that takes a lot of time to develop.” This is the main reason she doesn’t allow her first-year students to use the first person. Writing about yourself can simply be “the path of least resistance.”

In an article attacking first-person journalism in September, Laura Bennett, a senior editor at Slate, argued that websites such as xoJane, Buzzfeed Ideas and Gawker are turning any thought or experience a writer has into a meaningless article. But, she noted, personal stories are often the only way for young journalists to get a response from publications. And the ones that gain traction are those that describe something terrible that a writer had to go through.

For freelance journalists, the personal essay is a quick way to make some cash—no research or fact-checking required. Writers who can’t afford to spend much time on each of their stories in order to make enough money to survive know they need to give a good pitch or they won’t be published. The stories that grab attention are ones about sad and painful events. Bennett quoted Jia Tolentino, Jezebel’s features editor, who says, “Writers feel like the best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them.”

Meanwhile, Hamilton Nolan, who wrote “The ‘Writing About Yourself’ Trap” on Gawker, wants journalists to remember that getting published doesn’t have to mean writing “sexy, salacious, crazy, wild, demeaning, shocking, depressing or self-glorifying stories.”

Despite the critics, websites find value in these stories, under the right circumstances. Souzan Michael, associate digital editor of Fashion Magazine’s online site, says she carefully decides when a first-person story will speak to a topic better than it can be told otherwise. She wants stories that are true and relatable, which can only be done “by being yourself.”

After all, first-person narratives use something we do all the time—storytelling about ourselves—to explore difficult and uncomfortable subjects. Good journalism, in other words.