Helen Sanchez and Alexandra Bulovas
“It’s easy to get lost in the crowd.” Graduate assistant Alexandra Bulovas and psychology major senior Helen Sanchez discovered while volunteering for the Aggie HelpLine that students can experience isolation and loneliness in the midst of 60,000 other students. Each told StoryCorps that the “privilege” of talking to callers has showed them that the A&M student body is resilient.
- [Helen] A&M is talked about as one of the friendliest campuses in the nation and I think that's true. I think it's a unique campus because we're one of the largest in the nation and there's so many different student organizations to get involved in and things to do, but at the same time, I think it's really easy to get lost in the crowd. And so, kind of relating it to a small liberal arts school, I think if you're there, everybody kind of knows everybody, but at A&M, there's over 60 thousand students and so, if you walk to campus alone every day and eat alone in the dining hall, it's really easy to get lost in the crowd. You can have a profound experience of isolation and loneliness in the midst of this massive crowd of students and so I think helpline made me just more aware that that [sic] situation was going on for a lot of our student body. On the more positive end of things, I think it's also shown me the resilience of our student body. Like you talked about before, just how brave our callers are. I can definitely relate to that because a lot of the times, our callers will describe going through so much, dealing with mental health challenges or dealing with struggles at home or breakups or academic stress and then they'll say, "Yeah, I gotta go because I've got an 8 a.m. in the morning." And it really sinks in that wow, we have such a resilient student body that handles a lot of adversity, but is still working toward their life goals and is still working toward earning a degree in the midst of so many other things going on. And so, I think it's shown me the negatives of our campus, but also so many positive things and just the great resilience of our student body.
- [Alexandra] Definitely. Hearing their stories puts our own stuff into check for sure and you get this kind of a nice reality check 'cause we can be frustrated because we got rained on and we didn't do as well on a test as we'd hoped and feel just all angry and frustrated and like our problems are huge and then you sit down and take a call and you talk to someone who lost a parent, who lost a close friend to suicide, who's having relationship issues. All of that can be something that one person's experiencing, yet they're still in school. They're still really trying and motivated and it reminds us that, wow, there are people out there who are struggling much more than we are and look at how amazing they're doing and helps us to remember to put everything in perspective and not to take ourselves too seriously or our problems too big.
- [Alexandra] What's something that you would like callers to know before calling or something you wish you could tell a caller, but haven't?
- [Helen] I want people to understand that we don't offer advice or opinions and I want them to understand why our goal with that is definitely to empower our callers to think about their own situation and to be able to reason through that themselves. We wanna provide an unbiased listening ear that is not involved in their situation and just give them the space to work that out themselves. More importantly though, I feel like I want people to know that they're not a burden for sharing their story with us. I still think it is such a privilege to hear someone's story and to hear their struggles that they may not have ever expressed to anyone else. Sometimes I think callers are resistant to open up to us about really hard stuff because they're worried that it'll depress us or, "I'm sorry, I feel like I'm just being a burden on you." And I just want to stress to callers that that [sic] is not the case, that we truly do view it as such a privilege to hear their story. I also want them to know that no problem is ever too minimal to be talked about on our helpline. Sometimes people are worried that they're wasting our time because other people probably have more important issues to talk about. I just really want people to know that if it's important to you, we are here to listen about it. It does not have to mean that you're in a moment of crisis. If it's on your mind, we wanna hear it.