Arielle Isack

I used to literally skip out of Tom Harford’s office on the third floor of Lewisohn. I distinctly remember having a massive grin on my face every time I walked down the staircase, going out of my way to declare to my friends that he was “a homie.” To this, my friends would roll their eyes and call him my “academic sugar daddy” or my “fairy godmother.”

I was in denial for a long time that I had a “type” when it came to dating. What’s a type, if nothing more than a limiting schema through which to view attractiveness? I thought that those who strictly abided by a “type” simply lacked the requisite free will to detach themselves from whatever Freudian mechanism led them to finding appealing certain traits, physical or not. Not I. All throughout high school, I watched my friends and loved ones fall victim to the familiar lanky, emaciated-looking, “I’m different” white boy ruse. All the while, I swore to them that if they just discarded their undying attraction to the same highly specific demographic, all their dating issues would evaporate like mist, and happiness would be theirs.

How do you sleep at night? I ask this with none of the sanctimony that usually accompanies the question. I genuinely want to know what it is you tell yourself that allows you the requisite peace of mind to slip into unconsciousness at night. For me, it’s delusion and 3-5 mg of melatonin.

There was no indication that the sexual encounter I participated in last Saturday would quite possibly be the worst one of my life until the last five minutes of it.

I once spent a morning with two non-Americans who ever so graciously offered to buy me a cup of coffee. When I indicated that I wanted a cappuccino, I reflexively followed my request with “with almond milk, please.”

If you know me, you know that I have spent the past two weeks grappling with a particularly bad bout of depression. The constant feelings of defeat and lack of motivation have been so overwhelming and so crippling that they have driven me to the edge of sanity, and I was so desperate that I did the unthinkable: I called my mother.

When I look back on being in the eighth grade, the two things I remember most vividly are the ever-present anguish of being a 13-year-old girl and a particular scene from Life of Pi. In this scene, after months of drifting along at sea, Pi and the tiger finally washed up on shore. As soon as they hit dry land, the tiger walks off the raft and slips into the jungle—never to be seen again. Pi is thus left alone to contemplate the significance and enormity of the journey they had taken together, as well as his feelings of pain and hurt at the lack of ceremony in their parting. His pain is shrouded in a layer of shame, one that is rooted in his initial, albeit wholly unrealistic expectation of acknowledgement from a tiger.

“Have you ever been in a codependent relationship?” The question came during a late-night encounter I was having with a boy I was seeing at the time. It was the first time I had heard the term, and when I told him that I had not, he launched into a detailed account of the “codependent relationship” he had been in during his first year at Columbia. When recalling the sheer anguish that came with extricating himself from his codependent relationship, he explained to me that his worst fear was falling into that type of mutual dependency again, the type where one person ostensibly satisfies all your requirements—checks all your boxes—to the point where all other relationships are neglected, and eventually fade into oblivion.

Alexa Roman is a sophomore in Columbia College studying English. She works with the First-Generation Student Advisory Board to address prominent issues in the low-income community on campus. Additionally, she works with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to improve outreach to underprivileged groups. This column serves as a continuation of Alexa’s prior work detailing the experiences of FGLI students at elite universities. Outside of her work, Alexa can be found worrying her mother about the college experience and romanticizing Koronets despite its subpar quality. She would like to remind you that you are still not middle class. Alexa can be reached via email at alexa.roman@columbia.edu, but only if it’s something nice. Her column You’re Still Not Middle Class runs alternate Mondays.