Pets have been a constant in my life, growing up we always had animals, usually dogs and cats but there was a time when we had cows and chickens too. As a young girl growing up, my family and I lived in my great-grandparents farmhouse for a few years. While there, and for the rest of my adolescent-teen years, we had a golden retriever named Yogi. He was a silly dog, afraid of the weather changing, water, and loud noises. But he put up with the shenanigans of a little girl and would let me dress him up in princess clothes with no resistance. The old farmhouse we lived in backed up to acres of undeveloped land that was mostly forest and Yogi would spend his days roaming in the woods. One of my strongest childhood memories is of when playing outside, if I fell or hurt myself and started crying Yogi would find me, anywhere and anytime. He would come running from the woods straight to me checking to be sure I was okay, licking and sniffing my face. When satisfied I was all right, he would run back into the woods and continue his exploring. These moments taught me about the unconditional love a dog can give to a human, the love that we as people should be passing on to each other but instead find in the simple innocence and compassion of pets. Throughout my childhood my family and I moved eleven times, and the one constant I always had was that the pets we had loved me unconditionally and I loved them. Yogi lived to a very old age, and in that time I got a dog of my own named Millie, who also lived a long life. The influence pets have had on my life is immense and has mostly taught me how to love and how I want to be loved. I have my own dog and cat now that my husband and I adopted, and I would love to be able to adopt more animals that need homes and love. I believe that animals are the best of us, that we are not better than them for all our advancement and ability to higher thinking, they know more about how to love than humanity has ever learned.

Books have been a constant love in my life but it did not start out this way for me. I hated books, and reading, anything to do with it until I was nine years old and I picked up the children's book series Hank the Cowdog. After this, I was hooked and reading has become an integral part of my life. It is hard for me to pick just one favorite of the many books I have read and loved but I do have one that I would like to bring attention to. This is the book I tell people is my favorite when asked, both because it is, and because I have learned that people take offense to hearing, "I don't have favorites". This book is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, an incredible novel about a girl, a boy, a book and Death. I was drawn to this novel because of the use of Death as a narrator, a being of physical proportion and not simply a concept, which is something I find interesting. The writing is incredible, at once innocent and sarcastic, a mixture of the naivety of youth and the ageless perspective of Death. The Book Thief is the first book I read that made me cry, something I use personally as a mark of a truly excellent book, as only a handful of books have made me cry. I was moved by the emotions of Death, the finality and the unknown, the painful existence of knowing you are only there to witness pain and then whisk it away so that it almost never existed. The novel ends with Death professing that he is haunted by humans, by the hope and the pain that we bring about and I believe this idea will haunt me, forever.

My self-are practices have been learned and I am still learning how to implement self-care more fully into my life. I do simple things like taking bubble baths when I'm stressed or watching a comfort show/movie. I have had to learn how to talk kindly to myself, not focusing on the things I see as negative and instead focusing on my strengths and accomplishments. This has been a more difficult thing to learn and is something I actively have to remind myself to do. Another aspect of self-care that I have learned is setting boundaries with people who are not healthy for myself, even if those people are family. I have had to actively teach myself not to live by others opinions and to do what I feel and perceive as right for myself and my life, something I consider self-care because in these instances I am taking care of my present self and my future self. I take care of myself by doing activities I know will lift my spirits, by acknowledging when I need to take time to rest, and by actively thinking of my future and how I want to live my life now and what impact that will have on my life in the future.

One of the biggest things that fuels my life is as cheesy as it comes and that is, love. Specifically the love of my husband, who is my best friend, biggest supporter and partner in mischief. He is the sunshine of my life. He and I have been together since right after graduating High School in 2015 and have been inseparable since. We have worked together, lived together and apart, and grown out of our teens and into our twenties together. I live every day striving to make him laugh, and to make him proud of me. I am fueled by the desire to provide for him, as he is fueled by the desire to provide for me, and we are actively working to achieve the life we both want.

Encouraging the people I care about is something I have never found hard. Rather it comes very naturally to me, I aspire to be the person that my friends come to when they are having a bad day and I am happy to say I have achieved that. I encourage those I care about my actively listening, offering words of encouragement and advice when needed, and by doing my best to be there for them when they need me. However, I strive to not just be an encouragement to those I'm close to but also to everyone I come into contact with. A smile, a kind word, or a compliment are easy ways to encourage people you meet only briefly in life. I know I have had my day brightened by these types of things and I do my best to put that energy into each interaction I have with people. The most memorable moment of encouragement I have is when I was in high school my friends and I threw a birthday part for a girl we were not close friends with but who had told us that she hadn't had a birthday party since she was thirteen because no one came to her party then. We were determined that not be her last birthday memory and threw her a surprise party. It was really wonderful to see how happy it made her and was fulfilling to know that I had made a positive impact in her life. This is the type of energy I try to put into everything I do, a gentle and kind approach to life and the people doing their best to live it.

Persistence has been something that I have not had to seek out in life; it is something I have been forced to adhere to but from which I have benefited. Growing up my mother was diagnosed with cancer (melanoma) when I was just eight years old, and this began a lifelong battle for her. Most recently, she was re-diagnosed in 2020 after several years of being cancer free and after a stressful year of being in and out of the hospital, she is doing well and recovering from the effects of the treatment she underwent. Throughout this experience, from childhood on, I have been pushed to new levels of persistence to achieve what I wanted from life. This persistence exceeded the levels it had settled at during my first year of college, the fall of 2020-spring of 2021 as this was also the time that my mother was re-diagnosed with cancer. My persistence served me well during this time as I was working part time, studying full time, taking care of my mother, and dealing with the stress and emotion of the potential of my mother’s death, as her treatment had made her incredibly ill. This also resurfaced childhood trauma from my mother's previous bouts of cancer. But I persisted during this struggle, passing all my classes, and even managing to get mostly A's, something I am personally very proud of. While everyone's pain is not the same and no one struggles the same the importance of persistence in life is immense; you can only achieve what you believe you are capable of, and I know after that first year of college that I am both capable and persistent enough to achieve my dreams.

In life it is easy to take the silent route and not speak your mind, to let others talk over you and never express your own opinions and thoughts. I was a very shy child and teenager, I struggled with speaking my mind and social anxiety. I realized that this was getting in the way of living my life to the fullest when I was a junior in High School and in that year I made an active effort to be more social, to speak out more, and to let myself feel unashamed of what I had to say. As a teenager this equated to going to more social gatherings and to speaking up when my friends were making plans. As I got older this became something much more important as I began dating, became engaged to and eventually married my husband. My parents were aggressive about their displeasure in our relationship based on the fact that my husband is not religious and my family comes from a conservative Christian background. During this time I learned how to speak my mind, how to stand up for what I wanted and what was best for myself, and how to live my life in a way that was free of the constraint of others opinions. The culmination of this discord with my parents was them almost not coming to the wedding and actively sitting out of all wedding planning/events. My husband and I have been together now for seven years, married for four and could not be happier. Through these experiences I learned the importance of taking a stand for myself, for what I wanted in life and then achieving it. I have learned to speak my mind not only with my words but with my actions as well.