Missouri State has always put student affairs as one of their top priorities, but this year the Student Government Association allowed students to tell their stories.

Essentially, someone writes a phrase somewhere on your body, and then you take a professional picture behind a backdrop.

The phrase I picked was "I know that it's mine" from the song "Mine" by Phoebe Ryan.

My freshman year of college was really hard for me, and I went through a really dark period in my life that left me feeling alone and estranged from my former self. I felt like my identity had been taken from me, and I couldn't talk about it with anyone because I was embarrassed for feeling the way I did and for what had happened to me.

But this song really helped me feel like I could find myself again. The lyrics "I fumbled through the wreckage, put it on a necklace, keeping it cause I know that it's mine" stuck out to me. To me, it meant that at the end of the day, my pain is just mine, and only I can understand how to process the pain I'm going through.

It encouraged me to wear my pain with pride and rebrand the pain itself, to not look at it as something bad. That if I've felt like I've lost everything else, then the only thing I know is mine is the experience I went through.

I applied to lyrics to every situation I faced in my life, and there was a sense of empowerment with the words "I know that it's mine". I may have felt like someone took something away from me, or that I've lost my autonomy, but I know that pain is mine and no one can take that away from me.