Powerlifting is fun.
It’s power.
It’s reclamation.
It’s hard.
It’s frustrating and amazing.
With the dead lift,
when you start pulling and it doesn’t immediately move off the floor but you have to keep grinding
and you’re losing grip and your hands hurt,
sometimes your hands tear,
and it’s harder to breathe and you feel yourself just being compressed
and you have to remember to try to keep standing even when you’re shaking,
but if you keep pushing,
you’ll be strong enough to handle it.
You’ll be strong enough to handle anything and I think that’s really, really important
to always remember just to keep pushing,
that it will get easier over time.
I guess working hard,
to me at least,
is when the actual work is what motivates you,
when the actual work is what gets you out of bed every single day.
You’re not just working out because you want to get in shape,
you’re not just working out because you want to be in a sport,
you’re working out because you love it,
because it motivates you,
because it puts a fire under you.
You know if you have 300 pounds on your back and you’re squatting,
you get down into the hole,
you get to the bottom of the lift
and you have to fight.
You have 300 pounds and gravity pushing against you.
And it feels terrible.
Sometimes you will feel like you’re dying
and it’s no fun,
but you have to keep pushing.
That’s what powerlifting is.
It’s just grinding.
It’s all about the grind.
A lot of the times, people will be surprised,
or they’ll say, ‘Oh you don’t look like you lift weights.”
“You don’t look like you’d be a powerlifter.”
Which I find problematic because what is a female athlete supposed to look like?
And another one I get often is that men will often say,
“Oh, so you’re strong…for a girl.”
And that always bothers me and my favorite retort to that is,
“No, I’m not strong for a girl.
I’m just strong.”
From a young age, I thought tattoos were beautiful,
I thought they were a form of body art.
I always wanted them.
I would draw on myself through high school,
which drove my mother nuts.
My favorite is my “Strong For A Girl” one.
It’s actually Princess Mononoke, who’s a character from a movie
and in it, she’s a wolf princess.
And she’s a warrior and a fighter and just a ruthless young girl.
And then I have a half-sleeve of flowers that the flowers all have different meaning dedicated
to different members of my family.
I think a lot of the times people think people with tattoos are less intelligent,
that they aren’t successful,
that they aren’t serious.
And so I understand that in certain climates and certain spaces, I need to present in a
different way.
I’m a PolySci major and a Women Gender Studies minor,
and this semester I intern at the State House.
I kind of have to present myself in a much more conservative manner at the State House,
so that’s why I cover them up.
No piercings, no tattoos, nice hair,
you know, because I want to be taken seriously
and I want to be in that space and I want my voice to be heard,
so those are the measures I have to take.
I interned for Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier
because she deals with a lot of legislation that affects women.
She is creating a campus safety bill
and a survivors’ rights bill that would help to protect women from sexual assault
and help victims and help survivors
and I think that’s incredibly valuable.
And I would really love to be involved in things like that in my life further down.
You’re the queen of highlighting?
Hello!
I’m the queen of highlighting.
Excellent.
Following suit.
I want to help women
in life because I think
discrimination against women
is often really overlooked
and I believe women aren’t always told that it’s okay to be powerful.
I believe that women aren’t taught to be powerful.
And I believe that we need to teach girls to take back power.
I think we need to teach women that it’s okay to take up space.
Before I came into college, I struggled with my body image
so incredibly much.
I was incredibly insecure
and I was always fixated on taking up less space.
I was always obsessed with being smaller, I thought that’s what
I should be, I thought that was beautiful.
But once I started powerlifting,
I no longer fixated on how much I weighed,
I fixated on how much I could lift
and I no longer obsessed over how thin I was.
I wanted to see my traps,
I wanted to see my quads,
I wanted to see my muscles grow.
And so instead of trying to take up less space, I became more fixated on trying to take up
more.
And I think that’s so incredibly valuable.
I think that has a lot of emotional and mental implications with it.
Powerlifting has definitely made me the person I am
and it’s made me a powerful woman
because it’s shown me that it’s okay to take up space,
that it’s okay to speak out,
it’s okay to be bold,
it’s okay to be strong.
And I think there’s something that translates from physical power into being able to feel
confident in all other areas of life.