When I think of writing, the first few things that come to mind are books and poems. It’s something that was pushed on us from elementary school all the way to college. But, as much as those things are important for our education and personal growth, they never really push the importance and impact of writing. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King's speech, "I have a dream." One of history's most powerful speeches during the civil rights movement. I couldn’t imagine how Dr. Martin felt when writing his iconic speech; all the emotion and passion he poured into the speech. One of my favorite lines from the speech would have to be "I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." It is just an unbelievable and powerful line from Mr. King. Even with how the world was at that time, Mr. King wanted everyone to be united. All the odds were against them, but that didn’t stop Mr. King from having a vision for future generations. That style of writing is not taught in school; it comes from the soul. Writing for me has impacted my life. Last year, I was going through a rough time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and where it was headed. I was having trouble sleeping at night. Part of that was just overthinking and in my head. Nothing I tried worked. Exercising more didn’t help. I honestly think it made it worse. Waking up at an earlier time wasn’t effective either. One night, I decided to grab a journal and just write whatever was on my mind. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but the next morning I woke up on the couch with my leg on the ottoman, the book on the floor, and my pen was missing. For the following week, I tried the same thing each night before bed. I put my phone away at 10 PM and wrote in my journal until the pen started to feel light and my head started to lean downwards. Writing cured my insomnia. At the time, I was taking community college classes and decided to join a small writing club. The club ended up shutting down due to low attendance. Fast forward to December of 2021. I set up a blog on Wix. It was the best decision I could have made for my professional career and for my mental health. Why would writing help my mental health? I’m the type of person that would keep my emotions to myself rather than talk about them with someone. I've had something terrible happen to me, and I've kept it to myself. Writing would fill the void. I would express my emotions on a piece of paper rather than talk to someone that I loved and was close to. I would have preferred to write about my day on a piece of paper rather than with my own family. Write about the unfair and disgusting world we live in. If we die today, our job will be on a job board in the next few days. People are dying of starvation every second. Ungrateful kids are complaining that their room isn’t big enough. However, kids around the world would love to just have a roof over their heads and not be worried if they were going to eat today. Looking back now, I realized that wasn’t the type of writing I wanted people to read and think of me for. That’s when I took a different approach to my writing and decided to try a new type of writing. Documentation and article-style writing. What drove me to this type of writing occurred when I was doing personal documentation for a personal project that I was working on. My cybersecurity instructors praised on documenting our work when working on a project or while working on capture the flag challenges. One early morning when doing my daily routine, I stumbled across a blog that appeared to be from a hacker. One post he had on his site was a walk-through on window privilege escalation. It was a long post, and it was very in-depth and technical. The writer wrote in a way that was engaging and interactive, which forced me to keep on reading all the way till the end. I fell in love with this style of writing, and it’s revolved around cybersecurity, which is something that I’m very passionate about. I uploaded my first blog on December 12, 2021. If you have made it this far, I want to say thank you! I know that currently I'm not getting the most views on my posts. But if the content I post helps someone in any way, or if they learn something new, that is all I ask, and ask for. Thank you for reading and I will see you in my next post.