So for the past few --Wow, this feels super weird. Writing for the sake of writing after a long period of time. It feels difficult, but oddly satisfying to put my ideas back on paper. I guess if I want to start writing weekly again, it’s something I’ll have to get used to. I sort of missed you guys, you admittedly few people who read these articles. You have seen a lot more of my personality in these articles than a lot of other people have, and maybe you missed me? Whatever. Anyway, before I get back to writing about other things, like Pokemon Sun and Moon, stupid crap Trump might be doing, or random inside jokes only people who do Model UN would get, I guess I can address why I’ve been gone for a while.

I originally started writing for the Odyssey for two reasons. One, because someone asked. But two, and this is probably more important, is that I had nothing pressing going on at the time. I thought it would be a good use of my time to write, not necessarily for the purpose of an audience, but that I got some ideas off my chest. I’m not often granted a platform like that, apart from talking about politics with some people at Wooster, so it felt like a way I can just say what I thought. However, sometimes you realize you have a lot less time than you think, and something like Odyssey can just get away from you. I learned this last semester.

The latter half of 2016 wasn’t always too pleasant. Classes got hard, majors were changed, papers that I had 5 weeks for got completed in 8 hours, etcetera. But maybe the biggest contributing factor was that the things I thought would be a break from the academia ended up becoming a lot of unnecessary stress. A lot of times, it was self-inflicted, but that didn’t bother me. I enjoy the work I make myself do, because otherwise I wouldn’t do it. No, what contributed to the stress was more of a realization of what I did and what others saw me do. Take the last Odyssey article I wrote for example.

As I said, I write these articles mostly with the impression that they are more shouts into a void rather than something that many people can potentially read. And as I saw, sometimes the things I say can get people really toasted, like a Pop-Tart you put in the toaster with the settings at like 4 instead of just 1 or “warm.” People said I deserved the criticism, people said the critics overdid it. But regardless, I was swamped with a lot of negative reviews. And for something I had up to that point did for the LOLs, the reviews hurt a lot more than they really should have.

There are a few more examples, but in general, that amount of stress wasn’t the best for me. And when that happens, sometimes you have to make changes. Maybe realizing that the people you thought you were close with, weren’t all that close. Maybe what you thought you’d be doing throughout college isn’t what you end up doing as soon as next semester. And maybe you have to temporarily cut things out of your life in order to catch up on what you perceive as important. I didn’t think it would be at the time, but Odyssey ended up being one of those things that I ended up cutting out. But it’s a new semester, one that seems a lot more promising based on the beginning. And Odyssey is something I missed doing a lot. So I’m going to try and get back on track with it. And to people who weren’t the biggest fans of the tone or material of the last article, I promise that “Why Equestrians need to Buck Off” won’t be coming out anytime soon.

(Note: Equestrians are actually pretty cool. That was just the first semi-clever title I could think of on the spot.)