loneliness

“I'm lonely,” I told my therapist sitting in one of the CPS offices in Lerner. “I just feel so lonely sometimes.” The moment took hold of me, and I was surprised that I was saying it out loud. I hadn't even acknowledged it myself until that moment: I, Sabina Jones, the talkative, social, loudmouth, was lonely, and I had been lonely for as long as I could remember. When I said it, I was surprised that this feeling that had melted into my everyday being had a name. I was lonely, but aren't most of us?

After the week of NSOP’s manufactured fun, the isolating reality of being a student at Columbia begins. Although it was exhausting to have to repeat my name, college, and intended major to every person I met, I found comfort in constantly having company and never having to dine alone. However, once the revelry is over, it becomes exponentially more difficult to sit down at a table in John Jay and strike up a conversation with a stranger.

As my first year at Columbia wrapped up, I saw a bunch of Facebook posts from my classmates talking about what a great time they’d had. I was reeling from a terrible year with the worst depression I’d ever experienced, and while I didn’t begrudge other people their happiness, I did feel like I was completely alone in my feelings.

Yesterday, I was pranked by a group of 14-year-old girls. Well, they believed they pranked me, anyway.

We’re around people all the time, and we often spend the whole day dealing with them. We spend mornings and afternoons in classrooms full of people, in classes which are often quite interactive and involved. We spend evenings and weekends around people, too—“studying” with friends, doing extracurricular activities we think might look good to employers and law/medical schools, drinking, smoking, eating, making plans with friends, watching those same plans fall through a few hours later. We probably send hundreds of electronic messages every day. Sometimes, we even feel that it’s difficult to get away from people—more often than not, we have to live with them, and in a shared apartment, suite, or room, privacy and calm are often difficult to come by.

Last spring, while campaigning for student council, I went to River Hall for the first time. It was a weekday evening, but on a floor of 22 singles, only four or five residents opened their doors to me. I knocked on more than 2,000 doors in Columbia dorms that semester, and what I found was a great divide—a schism down the middle of our student body that creates two separate Columbias.

Whenever we talk about sonder—the realization that others are living complex lives—we tend to do so with a pseudo-poetic air. I'd like to suggest that maybe there's something a bit darker lurking below these surface realizations. Before I go any further, I should state that I don't mean what follows as some holier-than-thou screed or admonishment of Columbia culture. Instead, I'm hoping it will be more of a character study with a gentle lesson.

On the second week of classes, I walked into Dodge Fitness Center for the first time ever—as a senior. When I shared this fun fact with a friend, she laughed and replied in jest, "Seriously? Do you actually go here?"