Loving yourself, like REALLY loving yourself is not always easy for college women, but one student is here to change that.
Meet Alexzondrea Harrison, an environmental science student here at Winthrop. When she’s not journaling or watching her favorite animal documentaries you can find her working on different self-love related projects.
She recently held her first women’s empowerment event, a self love day party, so we decided to sit down and chat to hear Alexzondrea’s story.
You had your first women’s empowerment event here at Winthrop. How did you come up with the idea to do it?
“I noticed that there weren’t a lot of events for women that were like uplifting and empowering and I noticed that there were none for black women so I wanted to create something on Winthrop’s campus because we do have a lot of African Americans that go here so I wanted to create something for them so they could celebrate and be encouraged and empowered.”
You describe yourself as a self-love enthusiast, can you share what that means?
“So basically what that means to me is that I’m all about promoting self-love. I feel like that’s something that everybody should have because self-love is the foundation for all of your relationships.”
After hosting the Self Love Day Party independently do you have any event planning lessons learned?
“When you are trying to plan an event independently make sure you have a budget[…]and when you are trying to prepare know that things are not going to go as planned because hiccups are going to happen and you have to make back up plans for that and you have to improvise on the spot so just be ready for a change.”
What are some of your next goals? speaking, blogging, or programs?
“I do have a few goals I would like to start a blog kind of related to self-love catering more to black women. I would like to have more events and programs on campus related to self-love.”
How would you describe yourself at the beginning of your self-love journey compared to now?
“In the beginning I was a hot mess and filled with a lot of insecurities, hurt, and bitterness, and now I’m more understanding and patient with myself and I feel like I’m more compassionate towards me because I know that I’m still growing and I’m still learning.”
Any advice you would give to other women on how to love themselves?
“My thing is to know that you are an individual so don’t go looking on social media and start comparing your life and seeing that I’m single but all these other people are in a relationship […] that doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a relationship with yourself and if your relationship with yourself is rocky then your relationships with other people aren’t going to be healthy so my tip is just to focus on you first.”