The Odds Are Yes: How Writing Gave Me My Voice and Mission

Jul 2
3 min read

By Abby Brody

For most of my life, I lived by the odds.

I’m not talking about gambling. I’m talking about data. I was a “data-informed” educator — obsessed with patterns, probabilities, predictive outcomes. I optimized everything: lesson plans, school performance, even my dating life. (I once refused to date men who played golf because the odds of ending up a weekend widow seemed statistically inevitable.)

My world was spreadsheets and color-coded. I believed if I collected the right data, I could stay ahead of the chaos. I believed the odds could protect me and the students I served. My job was to keep everyone on track.

Then life handed me a number that didn’t compute.

My husband was diagnosed with a rare cancer. Then, just months later, my five-year-old son was diagnosed with an even rarer one. It was the kind of thing that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not once. Not twice. Not to one family.

The odds? They broke.

There were no models. No charts. No sense. The same woman who had led schools with performance dashboards and plotted predictive outcomes was now living in a hospital room, unsure if tomorrow would come — let alone what it would look like.

And so, I wrote.

At first, writing was simply a tool. A way to update friends and family about Jacob’s treatment without having to repeat the same painful details over and over. But soon, the updates morphed into something else: therapy. Survival. Truth.

In a world that had no logic, writing became the only place where I could make sense of what was happening.

It was also the only place I could tell the whole truth.

Not just the sanitized hospital updates, but the raw, raging reality: the loneliness. The waiting. The counting of white blood cells and the questioning of everything I thought I knew.

I didn’t write for likes or comments. I wrote because I had to.

Because I was falling apart, and these were the only words that were holding me together.

And then something unexpected happened.

People started reading. And not just friends. Thousands of strangers. The blog reached over 40,000 readers. Women began writing me back. They, too, had odds that didn’t make sense. They, too, felt like outliers in lives that weren’t supposed to happen this way.

And that’s when it hit me:

I wasn’t a freak of data. I was proof that the model was broken.

We all are.

We’ve been so busy measuring what’s average, we’ve forgotten what’s true.

The average doesn’t matter when you’re the one in the hospital. When it’s your child. When it’s your story.

We are not clusters or cohorts.

We are not sample sizes.

We are individual human beings — each one an entire data set of our own.

That’s what inspired the N=1 Movement — a radical rethinking of how we make decisions in medicine, education, and life. One that says: start with the person. Don’t design systems for the majority and expect everyone to fit. Design for one, and let everything scale from there.

Writing didn’t just help me heal. It helped me remember who I was — and then rebuild who I wanted to become.

I found my voice in the silence of hospital rooms.

I found my courage in the comments of readers who needed to hear the truth. And I found my mission by watching what happened when we stopped pretending life always makes sense.

Today, I use that voice everywhere — as a writer, speaker, mother, founder, and disruptor of broken systems. And I know I’m not alone.

There’s a reason this magazine exists. Because when women speak, we create ripples. And when we tell the truth — not just the polished parts, but the scarred, sacred pieces too — we make space for others to do the same.

So here’s what I’ll tell you, if you’re holding a story that feels too messy, too painful, too uncertain to share:

Tell it anyway.

You don’t have to be healed to have a voice.

You don’t have to know the ending to begin.

And you definitely don’t need permission to speak.

Your voice doesn’t have to be loud. It just has to be yours.

Mine started quietly, in grief.

But look where it led.

It led to a platform.