2018.

A year like a lot of others. Sort of like the past two years. However, I think this year was better received by the media than last year. I'm not sure why, maybe they were tired of repeating themselves.

However, when I say 2018 was a good year, I mean it. It was a good year for me personally. I feel like this is the first year since 2015, where I have made a lot of things happen. I feel like a lot of things are different for me now in a positive way.

Here are all the things that have happened to me in 2018 that added to my fulfillment, and have caused me to use the beautiful mountain sunrise as my cover photo for this article.

Speaking of articles, my Odyssey career has really kicked off this year. Even though I started writing here in October 2017, I feel like I have gotten way better at writing articles, and am actually writing about things I care about. I have written about a lot of different things as well, and have gotten a lot of views on my articles. I have also tried out submitting some of my poetry for The Odyssey, and think I will submit more in the future.

I have also experienced a lot of amazing things this year. If you've read one of the articles I wrote in March, you'll know that I got to go to a talk given by former Vice President, Joe Biden, at my university. It was honestly one of the greatest days of my life to get to see such an extraordinary person talk about their life and their thoughts on our country's current issues.

In addition, I got a taste of what it was like being a real journalist. I got to write an article for a local New Jersey newspaper, The Morristown Green. In order to write the article, I covered a town meeting on a potential development happening in the area. I had to take two different forms of public transportation, take really fast and detailed notes, ask total strangers to follow up with me the next day, and hope they actually did, try to figure out what to include, and have it in by a deadline. And this was on a Thursday night in February. It taught me a lot about what it means to be a professional journalist.

Speaking of working, if you've read my September article, you know that I had two jobs over the summer. You also know that I didn't really enjoy them. It still taught me a lot about having to do things you don't want in order to make money. I also made a lot of money, which is always a good thing.

I also took a lot of classes that I enjoyed very much. This semester, I took a poetry workshop, which encouraged me to start writing poems again, a feminisms on film class, which was very interesting, and a really fun dance class; however, there was a lot of show tunes, which was grating. Last semester, I took another exciting dance class, a women's & gender studies class, and a journalism class.

This year, there were a lot of small amazing things that happened to me. I will now list them for you. I found a lot of new podcasts to listen to, and listened to several. While I didn't go to Taylor Swift's reputation tour, I saved a lot of her tour videos on my Instagram, and they were amazing. I also cannot wait to see her tour documentary on New Year's. RuPaul's Drag Race, Big Brother, and Survivor are all having amazing seasons. Alyssa Edwards is on Netflix.

So yeah, my year was pretty good.