My Farewell Column

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.

After many years in The Times’s newsroom as a graphics editor and later the graphics director, then a short stint at National Geographic, I came back to The Times: I had met the executive editor for lunch. He convinced me to return to the paper. I told him that I would like to produce charts for Opinion.

When I met with Andy Rosenthal, then the editorial page editor and head of Opinion, he suggested that I write 400-word introductions for the charts, even though I wasn’t a writer. He demurred on the title I proposed, Op-Chartist, as too complicated, and told me I would just be called a columnist.

My heart began to race. When I stepped out of the building, I braced my back against it to keep from collapsing. I was hyperventilating.

Not only had I been given a title far greater than my aspirations, in that moment I had also gone from being a private citizen, which I liked and thought I would remain for the rest of my life, to being a public figure.

That was complicated for me. I was a bisexual man who had always assumed that the only disclosures I needed to make were to the people with whom I was involved. That idea was obliterated.