I started writing for Odyssey on December 10, 2017, that day changed my life for the better in more ways than one. When I first started writing, I thought Odyssey was a competition of sorts. However, that changed when Maggie, then EIC and now president introduced me to the group in the Groupme. Everyone was welcoming, and I got a little online welcoming party in a sense. I have never been happier than at that moment.

What Odyssey taught me is that your voice is important, it doesn't matter the experience you had in your life, it still matters. From reading other people articles, they realized that as well.

Odyssey taught me that I am my advocate and I am responsible for what I tell my readers; I am also responsible for the message I convey to them. It doesn't matter if I am talking about my anxiety or my experiences as a special needs student, I am my advocate because no one else can tell my experiences because I am unique. That is the fun part about Odyssey; no one is the same, everyone comes from a different place.

I also learned about community and how a community is supposed to act. A community is a group of people who have your back. Time and time again my Odyssey community has done that for me, between having an anxiety attack about failing a class to sharing the news that I got a good grade on the exam, my friends have been there for me.

Odyssey has become a tool of therapy for me because writing calms me down, I can write about anything including my feelings. I can turn my anxiety attack into an article about how to cope through an attack. Since becoming a writer my anxiety levels went down a little bit.

Odyssey for me is life-changing and I enjoy every second of it, I love writing and the people too much. I don't know where I would be without Odyssey.