Throughout my life, I've heard the constant reminder of one specific trait of mine: you're a woman. Since childhood, I have been beaten down, underestimated, and ridiculed for my gender. By the men around me, I was put down. I couldn't be smart, I was a woman. I was weak, I was malleable, I was a woman. I was taken advantage of, I was harassed, and I was a woman. This title was branded on my body, my clothes stripped off for everyone to see. It had become too much for me to bear, and while COVID brought its own set of struggles, I could not help but sigh in relief at the prospect of online learning. No longer did I have to interact with peers, the ones who had called me names, grabbed me and whispered sick words onto my skin. In this solace, health issues had developed, and after numerous doctor excursions, they concluded stress was the culprit. Stress is a killer they said. No, stress is what is making me sick, making me vomit everything I eat, making my body stop digesting, and making my body weak. This created a new set of problems. Not only was I a female, but I was also a sick one. Every time I opened my mouth to explain my sorrow, they wrote it off. They would chime in with their "at least you're skinny", and "we're all dying anyways", missing the point. This was not about me physically, this was not about my body. This was about how the constant incursion against my body caused it to stop working, the assault it had undergone by trusted peers made it turn against me as well. I threw myself into my education. If I could only prove to the world that I had some sort of value, it would be worth it. I enrolled in early college, made plans for additional college after graduation, and was hired at two jobs to save for my education. This way, they would not see me as a woman, they would not see me as sick, but as smart. As someone with potential. My parents told me I was wasting my time. College wasn't worth it, not when I could just settle down, find a husband, be a wife, be a woman. It was then I learned that if I was to pursue education, it would be without the aid of my parents, financial or emotional. It was all accumulating, the stress. The pressure. I did not realize it, but these experiences changed me more than I could have noticed at the moment. More than that, these challenges did not shut me down, but rather encourage me to work harder. I set time aside to work on my mental health, to repair the damage that had been done to me. Through dieting my health was managed. Through working, I was able to recover from my parent's lack of support, and by wanting to be more than my body, I developed a work ethic that surprised even me. At the end of the day, I am a woman. But in reality, I am so much more than that.