This week was Love Your Body Week on Dickinson’s campus. I table-sat with my Sigma Lambda Gamma sisters and we helped to promote body positivity through arts and crafts. We had people make hearts and write what they love about themselves or what they love about their friends/ loved ones and then take it with them as a beautiful reminder. It was rewarding to see people really enjoying our table and showing off their creative chops as well as really thinking about positive aspects of themselves or their friends.

I feel like events like this are so important, and it’s disappointing that there isn’t more a turn-out from Dickinsonians. While arts and crafts and free candy don’t necessarily cure anxiety or stress about campus life, I do feel that it is helpful to take a break and allow ourselves to breathe rather than remaining in the same headspace of work, all day, every day         for the rest of our lives- which is simply unhealthy. Too much of anything is unhealthy and if we continue to make ourselves sick over our work and stay up all hours of the night just to finish reading assignments for just one class, it becomes counterintuitive. We measure our value based on the grades we get in college because that is what we are told we need in order to get a “good job” and continue this cycle of being workaholics, only to be paid  and support our lives on minimum wage.

All of this is a round-about way of saying that self care and self love is SO important for us to live happy, healthy lives instead of being ruled by our routines.

Having events at Dickinson that encourage us to take the time to actually think about ourselves in a postive light and remind ourselves about our accomplishments allows us to develop, grow, or at least begin  a loving relationship with ourselves. To me, that loving relationship is imperative because at the end of the day, no matter how many friends, followers, or family members we may have, we are alone with ourselves every night. We have to face our own demons and deal with them, we have to love ourselves when we are trained to believe that noone else does.

With all that said, I challenge Dickinsonians to go to events such as Love Your Body Week, and learn about the resources we have on campus which are meant to support our mental and physical wellbeing. Again, this is not a definite solution to everything we may be dealing with, but hopefully its a good place to start on our individual journeys to wellbeing. It also helps to love one another.