Four years ago, I almost died. As a suicide survivor and a now relatively happy and healthy individual, I have had an incredibly steep learning curve on how to be happy through tough times. After my suicide attempt in my junior year of high school, I spent countless hours in therapy through residential psychiatric treatment, outpatient treatment, and continuing to this day. However, the best and hardest part of my recovery was changing schools and joining the track team. I am a remarkably unathletic person, I trip up the stairs, over my own feet, and sometimes on nothing at all. I had no idea I would end up making it onto the varsity team for pole vault (of all things!) by my senior year. Now, you may be wondering how the track team factored into my mental health recovery, and it's actually quite simple. Two of the best things you can do for treating depression are consistent outdoor exercise and positive social interaction with peers. Therefore, I joined the track team despite any previous experience and a complete lack of athleticism. The first few months were insanely hard. I barely knew anyone, and I was by far the slowest person on the team, constantly out of breath and sometimes not even finishing the races. But through training and persistence, I stopped having races I didn't finish. Then my coach suggested I learn pole vaulting since its' heavy focus on technique would allow me to compensate for the fact that I am not a fast runner. I spent the next year and a half continuing to work on my mental health, learning coping strategies for my mental health, and continuing to go to track practice every day after school. The most important strategy, both in overcoming the obstacles in my mental health and in becoming a better vaulter was persistence. I learned that even if something seems impossible, it is possible to do just about anything if you dedicate a couple of hours a day to it. Breaking harder tasks into smaller steps makes the challenges easier, and in many ways, the process of learning to pole vault was analogous to my mental health recovery. When you learn to vault, you don't start jumping 10 feet over a bar, you start by jumping 3 feet up onto the mat with no bar. Then, after you've mastered the basic motions, you slowly move on to harder things. For my mental health, this was less therapy and adjusting to full-time school and track, and for pole vault, this led to me vaulting over a seven-foot high bar by the end of my second and final year in track. Overall, persistence and breaking tasks into smaller steps have been the most valuable things I learned through the process and I still use this as my problem-solving process in life.

My mom is a very influential person to me, and she has taught me what feminism is and why it is important, especially as women in developed nations gain more rights. My mom has taught me that feminism is fighting for women everywhere in the world to have the ability to make the decisions to do what they want with their lives and bodies, as well as to have equal rights for everyone regardless of their gender. Feminism is important because half of the world's population is female, and to deny rights or deny the ability to choose how to dress, live, love, or speak to half the world's population is a loss for all of humanity. In addition to this, my mom has shown me throughout her life how feminism allows women to pursue a career outside the home, or as a stay-at-home mother, and both are equally empowering to women as long as they can choose either path. As a child, my mom treated me and my brother equally, showing me from a young age that your gender does not affect your abilities, or what you should have the right to do. Now, as a young adult, she expresses to me how the life that we have as middle-class, white women in America is the result of generations of feminist women, and how we have an obligation to do whatever is in our power to ensure that women of other races, classes, and countries are allowed all the same rights and opportunities as we are. My school provides opportunities for the feminist movement by having a section of the student on-campus housing designated as a women's living and learning community, which hosts biweekly, free to all student lectures on topics like women in STEM, women's psychology, and gender in Christianity, to name a few that I have attended. I also intend to go into a career in law, where I hope to make a difference in gender equity cases in family law, ensuring that women maintain their rights and freedoms throughout their marriages and divorces, if necessary. To prepare for this, I make efforts to stay informed in current events affecting women globally, as well as locally. Overall, because my student community on campus provides so many opportunities for women, it showcases well the world feminism intends to achieve for all, and because of this, I am preparing to spend my life trying to spread the same opportunities I have to all women.

Seeing the needs of the people in my community inspires me to get involved. Every year my university has a day of service where we spend the entire day providing volunteer hours to organizations in need. Last year, I started helping in the community garden on my campus. While the work is physically challenging, it is encouraging to know we are helping provide food for people that need it. In addition to this, for most of my secondary education career, I volunteered weekly at a soup kitchen with my grandma. My grandma is so dedicated to serving her community, volunteering at the soup kitchen until covid shut it down, and now crocheting hats for the troops and donating dozens of hats a month, she inspires me to want to volunteer in the same way she does. Her compassion for every person she comes across is astounding, and her genuine love of all people is something I aspire to have. I think if everyone volunteered in the community the way she does, the world would have far fewer problems. As such, I make an effort to find service opportunities through my school, through churches in the area and my friends' churches, and by looking for small ways to serve others. Because I attend a Christian university, there is a strong focus on serving other people in the school community. This means the school puts on events that are anything from potting plants to give to a friend to brighten their dorm, to service projects in food pantries through affiliated churches. As a result, serving others has become a part of my weekly if not daily routine. I work to influence change in my community by encouraging others to make efforts similar to my own. I encourage my peers to join me in showing kindness wherever possible, giving time to volunteer organizations, and listening to my friends and helping share information and volunteering at events that they put on as community service projects. My most recent volunteer work was decorating the rose parade floats, which benefits the community of the whole United States by providing beauty to start off the year. While it may have less of an impact than much of my other work, it is one of my favorite things to do yearly with my friends and has on more than one occasion been the first of many volunteer projects I invite my friends to join me in.