This weekend was a whirlwind of excitement and politics; secret service patted me down, I was surrounded by key members of both the South Carolina and National Democratic Party, I met a presidential candidate (Sen. Bernie Sanders) and I was in the midst of over 200 journalists on the political campaign beat for their news corporations. I also had the opportunity to cover the political rallies and the Democratic Forum that night for Odyssey on Snapchat and I also live tweeted the event from my twitter account.

This experience was made possible because MSNBC hosted the First in the South Democratic Forum at Winthrop University last Friday. Each of the Democratic presidential candidates spoke with moderator, Rachel Maddow about their policy positions and their pasts.

While I was sitting inside the forum the only thing I could think of was how similar my life was to an episode of House of Cards for the weekend and led me to one of my favorite quotes from the show, "We are nothing more or less than what choose to reveal." This quote has resonated with me ever since I watched the episode where Frank gave one of his iconic monologues.

Each day as college students and as adults we have the opportunity to foster relationships with different groups of people and many of those relationships are often different and this quote stands true, we are nothing more than what we choose to reveal to those people that we meet each day and we are nothing less than what we reveal in our everyday actions.

Journalists and writers tend to reveal more than the average person. We carve our thoughts into words and present them to the world as a declaration that our voices matter, that our existences and our experiences matter.

Odyssey provides an amazing platform to voice that your existence and your experiences matter and to reveal those parts of your personality that can only be expressed through your words.

There is bound to be a group of people that are going through what you are going through, that are experiencing the same struggles or joys that you're experiencing and they will resonate with those words you crafted because they cannot find those words within themselves.

This week our writers have revealed the parts of themselves in their stories that they haven't shown to anyone before. We explore the confidence that comes with the body positivity movement, the thoughts of a friend who is grateful for friendship, the intersection of being a Christian and a feminist; we explore the people of Winthrop and the emotions of a woman who's ex is in love with another woman.

I hope these stories resonate with you, our writers have taken their time to craft them for you and remember: your voice matters, your existence matters, and your experiences matter and we invite you to come declare that to world on our platform.