Reflections at the dog beach.

Hello everybody! It is finally here, my first blog post! This is kind of exciting and scary at the same time. For the next year, I will try to present my experience of being a second year in Columbia College Chicago’s Dance/Movement Therapy and Counseling program. I am glad that I survived the first year and am curious about what my second (and last) year in this program has to offer.

Starting a new semester and especially a new academic year always encourages me to reflect back on the past ones. What did I learn? What do I still have to learn? What did work well, and what did not? Therefore, before starting into my second year at Columbia, I sat down and created my “new year’s resolutions”.

Getting organized!

1. Get organized

After I unsuccessfully tried to juggle between class requirements, part-time job, and internship this summer, which resulted in me being completely overwhelmed and close to burn out, I made the decision to create a concrete schedule for myself to keep me on track with all my responsibilities and assignments. Therefore, in addition to stating my work, class, and internship hours, my new schedule also states when I am planning to do homework and when to take care of myself. Some people might wonder why I would schedule self-care hours. The answer is that, being a workaholic, I usually feel terrible when I think that I am not being “productive”, especially when there are a lot of things on my to-do list. Nevertheless, I realized that taking care of myself increases my productivity and that being stressed out, tired, and depressed prevents me from getting things done. In conclusion, I schedule my self-care to take of some of the pressure and feelings of guilt associated with “being unproductive” and also to make sure that I am taking the self-care that I need.

2. Self-care

Surprise, surprise. My second “new year’s resolution” goes hand-in-hand with my previously stated goal of better time management: making sure that I get the self-care that I need. By definition, self-care includes all intentional actions someone takes to care for their physical, mental, and emotional health. As every individual’s physical, mental, and emotional experience is different, I also believe that self-care can look different for everyone. So the first step in fulfilling my “new year’s resolution” was figuring out which actions provide some care for me. Right now I have settled on four actions: nutrition (minimizing sugar intake, increasing vegetable intake), exercise (every day for at least an hour), sleep (at least 7 hours), and recuperative activities (e.g. drawing, organizing, going out with friends, talking to family, going to the dog beach, etc.).

So far, I am able to follow my “new year’s resolutions” and I can see the difference it makes in my life. The challenge now (same as with all new year’s resolutions) is to keep them up for the next year. Let’s see how that goes!