Inside the Eyes of a Buzzfeed Employee

Lara Parker, a senior editor at Buzzfeed, grew up in southern Indiana and attended Indian Creek High School.

“I started writing when I was in Australia studying abroad in college. I originally started writing to keep my family and friends up to date with what I was doing there. I also had just been diagnosed with endometriosis when I got over there, so I ended up starting to write about that to figure out my feelings about it and to cope with it. It kind of came as an emotional outlet,” stated Parker.

She chose to write for the Buzzfeed community platform because she really enjoyed the content they created. In her free time, she said she would look at BuzzFeed to relate to the humor. She also said she saw herself working there because she really connected with the things they wrote about on their site. It felt like something she could relate to day to day.

A normal workday is getting to work at 9 am and checking the news and her emails. If there is something going on in pop culture, her and her team may sit down quickly to come up with content for the site and ways to cover it that other people haven’t yet. From there, she goes to meetings about videos, brainstorms, or checking on her writers to see what they are up to. She says it is very different every day, but she is on the internet constantly to keep up with the latest news to write about.

Parker also deals with endometriosis in her everyday life. Endometriosis is an often painful disorder in which tissue that normally lines the inside of your uterus, the endometrium, grows outside your uterus. Endometriosis most commonly involves the ovaries, Fallopian tubes, and the tissue lining your pelvis. This causes her to have to use heating pads almost daily to help cope with her pain. Anyone who has periods, imagine yourself having period cramps every day then turn it up by a few notches. Sometimes it causes her to be in too much pain to move and unable to do basically anything.

This causes her to sometimes not be wanting to get out of bed, or even being mad at her own body. The pain is lingering and ‘feels like it never goes away.’ When you have endometriosis, you can have surgeries, but it is known to come back within the next year. There are good days and bad days for Parker, but she still is very successful in her life.

Parker and her team publish many different articles every day. If you ever have any free time, I suggest going to check them out! Maybe even write your own Buzzfeed community article. You never know, you might even become as successful as the one and only Lara Parker.