“If you celebrate your differentness, the world will, too. It believes exactly what you tell it — through the words you use to describe yourself, the actions you take to care for yourself, and the choices you make to express yourself. Tell the world you are one-of-a-kind creation who came here to experience wonder and spread joy. Expect to be accommodated.” - Victoria Moran

If you are already in college, you know the pain of living in tiny living quarters in a building with hundreds of other people around at all times. Yeah, if you are currently living in dorms, or have at any point in time, you know that there is no such thing as alone time. For the fortunate few who have class schedules different from their roommates, maybe you will be allowed a couple of hours of down time in your room with no one around. But, for most of us, people are involved in nearly every moment of our college days. For most of us, even when our roommates are gone, our rooms are then quickly refilled with friends coming over to hang out, “work on homework,” etc.

For the most part, finding time alone is nearly impossible. For some people that’s OK. Certain personalities, myself included, are energized by being around people. There’s nothing that makes me happier than having people in my room to hang out, talk, drink tea and coffee with, order pizza and Thai food with, etc. In fact, some of my most dear college moments have included these aforementioned activities in our dorm room with some of my most favorite people surrounding me.

But even for those of us who love having people around, self-care time and down time are critically important to our functioning well. In college, this time needs to be more intentional and is often times more difficult to come by than it may have been at home. I have personally found a lot of solace in being able to get off campus and go to yoga a few times a week. Yoga has become my downtime and my space to shut my brain off for an hour or so and to reset. Sometimes my self-care time looks more like running off to the mountains and getting away from everything.

Other times on the day-to-day though, it looks more like sneaking away to somewhere I enjoy and getting food or coffee and just sitting with a book or journal and allowing myself to be. Honestly, sometimes I’m not even that good at allowing myself that reset. Sometimes it can be easy for me to get so caught up in life that I forget to set that time aside. I can tell when I haven’t allowed myself enough of that time though, and when I need to work more of it into my schedule.

So, with that, I say we all need downtime. We all need time to care for ourselves, and we need to work harder some weeks to create that time in college.