I had gone on a hiatus due to mental health reasons, but I am back.

Sometime during the beginning of the year, I quit The Odyssey because my mental state was on the floor all battered and dirty. Amidst this time of darkness, I reached a stalemate in my writing. I could stare at a page and not write anything or at least just one sentence in a matter of an hour.

I was so caught up in my head, I didn't know how to express myself. I had decisions to make. I had work that needed to be done. I didn't have time for anything else. Whatever was going on at the time was what occupied my mind from the moment I woke up till I went back to sleep.

So in those shitty days, I stopped doing what I enjoyed doing. My only healthy coping mechanism. Probably the only way that I can truly express what I'm trying to say. During those times, your young, charismatic boy was gone. He became distant and cold and foreign. A mystery with many seeping cracks.

A couple of weeks after me quitting, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. In all the chaos, I tried to push myself to write in the eye of the hurricane at least. I pushed myself to spill words, lines, paragraphs. Slowly, I began to see what would probably be my new writing project since I haven't worked on one in a long time.

However, the more I wrote, the more I was able to write different pieces. Verses, poetry, short works of writing. And it made me feel better. I recently bought a cute little journal where I feel like redacting some of my thoughts would be fun.

This time, I do not want to let go of my good friend.

Flash forward to today, and I can tell you ya boy is doing waaaaaaaay better than how he was at the beginning of the year. I feel like now I can finally reintroduce to my life one of my guilty pleasures, and let myself indulge into it because I deserve it. So I joined back the team at UCLA and was really happy when they welcomed me back. So now I can say, (if you are somebody who has kept up with my articles since I began) I'm back and better.

During those three months where I feel like I disappeared, a lot happened and a lot changed.