The Strongest Thing I Ever Built Was Myself

By Inez Carrasquillo

There’s a version of my life that plays really well online.

World record holder. Rogue champ. Arnold champ. Strong. Confident. Winning. Mom.

The Dominator.

What people usually get is the final snapshot. A woman on a podium, trophy in hand, like she showed up fully formed and has always been that person.

But that’s not how it went.

There was a stretch of my life where I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever become someone I could respect. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t even like myself. And there was a time when simply making it through the day without completely blowing up my life felt like something to be proud of.

I fought addiction, painkillers, and alcohol. I fought eating disorders. I was raising my son on my own. I was grieving my dad. I’ve been in very abusive relationships. Under all of it sat this heavy, constant pain, and I had no clue what to do with it.

I didn’t have the skills to sit in those feelings, so I ran. Sometimes into food. Other times into drugs and drinking. And the thing about running from yourself is you always end up coming back. When you do, everything you tried to avoid is still waiting for you, only now you’re dragging shame behind you too.

I remember knowing, deep down, that I had something in me, something big, and still choosing things that pushed me farther from the person I wanted to be. That’s hard to say out loud. It’s easy to tell the cleaned-up version later, the one where you wake up and decide to change your life. That wasn’t me. I wrestled with myself for a long time. I broke promises to myself. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I was just broken.

After you let yourself down enough times, you stop believing your own words. You stop saying, “Tomorrow will be different,” because you’ve already said it a hundred times.

That’s where I was. I didn’t need another quote. I needed my life to actually move.

And that’s when I found strength training.

At the beginning I had no idea it would be the thing that pulled me out. I just wanted to be stronger. I wanted to lose weight, get healthier for my son, see if I could push myself. For the first time in a long time, my body wasn’t something I was punishing. It was something I was learning how to take care of.

That shift mattered. I stopped treating my body like a problem to fix and started treating it like a machine that could do unbelievable things. And I realized pretty quickly that “strong” wasn’t only physical. I had to build mental strength too, for reasons that had nothing to do with a barbell.

Somewhere between training sessions, stone kisses, missed lifts, early mornings, and stepping into competitions, I started turning into someone else.

I’m careful with the line “strongman saved me,” because it’s tempting to package all this into a cute little story where I find a sport and everything gets better. That’s not what happened.

Strongman gave me direction. It gave me purpose. It gave me something that was mine, something I cared about for myself. Still, I had to do the work. I had to face what I’d been avoiding. And the biggest part, the part people don’t see, was making the choice, again and again, that I wasn’t going back.

Some days that choice felt empowering. Most days it felt draining. There were days I missed the old version of me because familiarity can feel safer than change. Nobody really tells you that part of getting better, that you can miss the person you were even when you know that person was destroying you.

I wanted to quit more times than I can count. I had enough reasons. I just never did.

I found out my dad had died during the rules meeting at OSG 2023, and I still went out there and competed. At the Arnold in 2024, I broke my face on the third event and came back the next day to compete. At Rogue in 2025, third event again, I broke my foot and tore a tendon, and I still showed up the next day, won two events, and won the whole show.

I had something to prove to myself, and yeah, to the world too. I spent so much of my life feeling like I didn’t deserve good things. Respect felt like something I had to earn with blood. So I worked, and I kept working.

When I won my first world title, Rogue 2024, I don’t think most people watching understood what they were really seeing. They saw an athlete who won.

I saw the girl who almost didn’t make it.

I saw every version of me that I thought would never become anything. I saw the years of being lost. I saw the addiction. The abusive relationships. The shame. The nights where I had no idea what the hell I was doing with my life.

I won Rogue in 2024, and again in 2025. I won the Arnold Strongwoman Classic in 2025. Those titles mean a lot, and I’m proud of them, I worked my ass off for them. But if I’m being honest, the titles aren’t what gets me.

What gets me is that the woman holding them is still here.

That’s the win.

I know what it’s like to want to disappear. I know what it’s like to be humiliated by your own choices. I know the feeling of looking at your life and wondering how you’re supposed to fix it. I know what it’s like to think everyone else has it together while you’re barely keeping your own world from falling apart.

I also know what it’s like to believe you’ve messed up so badly you’ll never be who you wanted to be.

If that’s where you are right now, hear me: you haven’t ruined your future just because your past is messy. You’re allowed to become someone new. You’re allowed to outgrow who you used to be. You’re allowed to forgive yourself and start again.

Even if you’ve started over a hundred times, start again.

I don’t romanticize my past. I don’t look back at addiction and tell myself it “made me stronger.” I don’t think the pain was required. I don’t believe I had to break parts of myself to become who I am.

There are choices I’d undo if I could. Years I’d rewrite. Versions of me I wish I could hold and tell her she doesn’t have to keep hurting herself.

But I can’t go back.

So I make it mean something now. I can let my story be proof to someone else that they aren’t hopeless or broken. I can show my son what resilience looks like. And I can keep becoming the woman I used to think was impossible.

There will still be rough days. Old insecurities still show up. I still question myself sometimes. The difference is I know what I’m capable of now. I know what I can survive. I’ve watched myself come back from places I genuinely didn’t think I’d escape. I’ve seen what happens when I refuse to quit.

None of this is luck.

My story isn’t neat. It’s messy and it hurts. It’s addiction, shame, mistakes, recovery, motherhood, failure, obsession, sacrifice, and then, eventually, redemption.

And I can finally say I’m not ashamed of it anymore.

What I know now, what I didn’t know then, is that you don’t need a perfect past to build a future you’re proud of. Sometimes the strongest people aren’t the ones who never fall apart. They’re the ones who know exactly what it feels like to fall apart, and they decide to put themselves back together anyway.

I almost lost myself. But I didn’t.

Every time I walk into a competition, every time I chase a PR, every time I step onto a podium, every time my son watches his mom do what she loves, I remember it: I’m still here. I made it.

And I’m not done yet.