By: Anna Sobczyk

Between classes, homework, jobs, and more, student life is busy. Not only is finding time for yourself (self-care) difficult, but it isn’t prioritized. Even though self-care is all over the media these days, actually implementing it can be received with scorn. I encountered this when I began to shift my personal schedule around to make time for myself more of a priority.

Exercise is my version of self-care. Swimming and running are my main stress relievers and my form of meditation. I especially love training for long-distance races, because it’s time and effort I put in just for my personal achievement. When I signed up for a half marathon in May, one of my extracurricular groups knew and saw it as a conflict of commitment. They tried to guilt me out of it even though I had carefully planned my schedule to have time for everything. They completely overlooked and undermined how important is was to me. 

I didn’t anticipate that training for this race—something done for myself—would be met with such backlash, especially from people it really didn’t affect. Oftentimes I think it’s easy to forget that people are multifaceted with several interests, and that we’re all trying to find the mix of interests that make us the happiest.