It has taken me a month to write my first Odyssey essay. Not necessarily because I haven’t had time to write it or because I haven’t had topic ideas, but because I am absolutely and totally scared to start sharing my thoughts.
This may sound stupid, especially for someone who aspires to be a journalist. There are so many questions, however, that come to mind when thinking about sharing my first article ever:
Who will even read this? What will my friends think? What do I really know about life and the things I’ll be writing about?
These questions have been quite paralyzing for a few weeks.
If there is something I have learned in 2017, however, is that I need to stop being so scared of rejection. If writing my articles and sharing them online for anyone who may be interested—which, let’s be honest, probably won’t be a lot of people—makes me happy (and can benefit my curriculum), then here I go!
So, be prepared for a lot of self-promotion and many articles to come in which I am both complaining about and reflecting upon my college life. Maybe this Odyssey thing will become like a public diary. I am sure I will do a lot of oversharing because I am quite good at embarrassing myself. Anyway, here’s to getting out of my comfort zone and hopefully getting you out of yours too!
I only finally got to writing this essay because I am avoiding studying for midterms so this seemed like a productive way of procrastinating. Also, my Editor keeps emailing me about submitting my first article so I guess I couldn’t put it off any longer.
No, I haven’t conquered my fear of rejection yet, but I guess this is a step in the right direction! We shall see!