I have always been the athletic type, even as a kid—even though I’m no good at sports. I loved running cross country in high school, along with playing lacrosse; my senior year, I even decided to double up on my fall sports and play field hockey as well as running cross country. I loved everything about being active—playing sports, watching sports, even just throwing or kicking a ball around outside with my friends was always better than sitting in my house and watching movies and playing video games.

From a very young age, my parents enrolled me in various activities, starting with dance, gymnastics and karate, cheerleading, basketball, and soccer. Then after middle school, I chose cross country, lacrosse, and field hockey. I even went on to run after high school for my community college my freshman year. To me, as an overly anxious person, being active was one of the best ways for me to rid myself of nervous or excess energy that built up over my day. I even found that staying active kept me better focused in my life.

After I stopped running for my college cross country team, I began to work more. At one point I had two jobs while studying, and had little to no time to go to the gym; I got all of my walking in throughout the day as a waitress who would pace the restaurant anytime I wanted to avoid a task—almost all of my shifts ended up like this. Once I started to work more than I actually worked out, I noticed a change in myself. I just wasn’t the same person that I used to be. I was moodier, more anxious, more stressed out, and I just wasn’t as good of a student. I really think that when I stopped working out, I stopped focusing on all of the things that should have been more important to me.

I recently moved out of my house and into an apartment at the university I attend. I started to make great friends who also had a love of working out, and I felt my life click back into place again. I had better schedules, be it sleep, study, or eating; everything was just clicking the way that it had clicked before. This past semester here was the best semester that I have had as a student, probably since elementary school. At the end of the semester, I found CHAARG. CHAARG stands for Changing Health, Attitude, and Actions to Recreate Girls. It’s a club that is being offered at more and more college campuses throughout the country. Though CHAARG has its own acronym, and its own face-value meaning, I can tell you what this club personally means to me.

CHAARG is about taking the woman that you were yesterday and molding her into who you want to be today. It is a family of women who want to better you while they better themselves; it is a support system, a therapy session—shout out to Caitlin for listening to me on or runs//workouts!— it is a place that I can be myself while I’m finding myself. CHAARG has helped me to find myself as well as love myself confidently and unconditionally. I am finding that with each day spent in the CHAARG family, I am becoming increasingly more comfortable in my own skin. More than being confident with who I am, I have learned to love myself – everything about myself – and that has led me to think about who I am as a person and how I deserve to be treated by others.

Since I joined this community of women, I have seen my outlook on life completely change. There isn’t a day that I can’t fix with a run or a gym session. There isn’t a moment that I regret in life— I really believe that everything happens for a reason, and I wouldn’t be myself without the experiences I have been through. I am learning how to become a strong leader, a friend, and above all else, an unapologetically happy woman. I am even starting to see these things change in my relationships too. Since my best friend and I have actually been best friends, I have learned what a healthy friendship looks like. I am learning what healthy relationships look like, and how I can maintain them in my everyday life.

I have learned through CHAARG that health is much more than just running miles every day and eating according to the food pyramid. Healthy is physical as well as emotional. To me, being a happy and healthy person is being someone that you take pride in, regardless of the day, regardless of your mood, and regardless of what you ate or did at the gym. Self-love is hard, but the girls in CHAARG make it so easy to fall in love with yourself. I am both my heaviest anchor, and my most buoyant lifeboat. It’s becoming harder and harder every day to sink, and I really do think that finding myself in CHAARG, and through my love of being happy and healthy I am able to float through life more and more each day.