Through the night

It was already dark and chilly that Sunday evening when campus media, student body leaders, and student affairs staff crowded into Dean Shollenberger’s office in Lerner to talk about how to deal with the sad events. Earlier that day, Tina Bu had taken her life on the third floor of River Hall, and by evening, everyone seemed a little lost. An expert from health services talked about the importance of shaping coverage to ensure that students didn’t react to the news with attempts of their own. Hanging in the air was a much more difficult question: How, exactly, should we react?
The most prominent student response has been a new focus on day-to-day well-being. As Wilfred Chan movingly documented in the first part of “How we’re doing,” a feature in the Dec. 1 edition of The Eye, Tina’s suicide prompted many students to acknowledge that they felt stress and unhappiness on a regular basis.

It looks like they’re not alone. The Wellness Project that emerged from student discussions with administrators about undergraduate stress has attracted numerous supporters. A bulletin board in East Campus asking students to leave a sign if they were stressed was quickly wallpapered with responses. I didn’t know Tina, and it would be deeply disrespectful to guess at the nature of her illness. But when an entire campus, it seems, cries out for help, it demands our attention. What is it that has gotten so many of us so deep in the hole?

The Friday of my orientation week was open-mic night. There were so many eager participants that they had to turn some away. And every performer was exceptional. I remember thinking, there’s nothing I can do as well as they can do that. When they kicked us out of Roone Arledge hours later, a crowd formed around the basement piano, where my classmates happily jammed into the night. I went back to my room.

Most of us got here by being that kid in high school—the one whose talent was so exceptional that it shined like the sun. I remember what it was like to slip into the hot seat at 4 a.m. and pound out a paper, start to finish, and never look back. I can’t do that anymore. I start from somewhere in the middle, I wander off in an uncertain direction, I throw most of it out, and I tell myself, “If I can get a page and a half done by dawn, I’ll be fine.” My consummate skill, that old sunshine confidence, is gone. And that, I think, is what troubles us in the dark of the night. Not that college is harder than high school—because of course college is harder than high school—but the sense that we are somehow worse, less able. Whatever it was that was in us, that we think made us who we are, isn’t there anymore.

When you think you shine like the sun, it’s hard to realize you’re a small dot in a big sky. Put that together with the deep-seated irony and sarcasm that permeate our campus culture, and it can feel like this is a bitter, vituperative place where everyone else will pounce when they realize you haven’t figured it out. But it isn’t. In nearly four years here, especially in two years at Spectator, I have gotten to know writers, artists, activists, designers, athletes, and many others who have skills I’ll never attain. Yet I can’t begrudge them their abilities, because they’re my friends.

And that’s just it. Everyone I know is more talented than I am, and I imagine you could say the same thing about your friends. We support each other through the dark nights, in part because we are all somewhere behind the game, we all feel the same doubts. Neither you nor I will be the best at Columbia. That liberates us to be extraordinarily decent to one another.

And while we’re doing that, we might just discover that we’re not as far behind as we think. Even if my all-nighters are more panicked now than they were four years ago, or even two years ago, they produce work that’s profoundly better than it once was. The doubts and uncertainties drive me to reach for stronger arguments and more sophisticated conclusions. The consummate skill wasn’t as good as what’s coming in its place.

If you feel the water rising above your head, I urge you to seek out help. And there’s much to be gained from thinking about how to make life happier for everyone here, as the Wellness Project seeks to do. But let’s not turn our doubts themselves into the problem. Let’s bid farewell to that old sunshine confidence. A talented generation should be brought together by its doubts. Because we, all of us, are bound up in the life of this extraordinary campus together, whether we like it or not. Even in our darkest nights, we are not alone.

Samuel E. Roth is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and political science. He is a former Spectator editor in chief. We Are Not Alone runs alternate Thursdays.