This is the second time I’ve tried to write this article. It’s been hyped up and cited in the interim, all the while I’ve made empty promises to finish it.

From the time I started it back in May, a lot has changed. Yet, the one crux of my personality that preempted this article’s genesis which was born after my co-editor and frequent victim to my rants, Evan Robins, exclaimed that she “loves it when I hate,” has not.

Evan’s exclamation sparked a rather strange bout of inspiration: maybe there is a sense of reason in my hatred. The hatred in question found itself haunting me after the last school year ended and I was left to my own devices to digest whatever the fuck the past semester had been. 

As an english major, I feel justified in making the claim that we fucking suck. Truly, we are insufferable. To the outside eye, every bit of criticism we get is grounded in the fact that we don’t know how to shut up and always have something to say about everything. Yet, what hit me immediately as I began the beginning of my Bachelor’s degree was that the act continues inside the classroom. 

Once the peacoats were off and the bestickered Macbooks were open, I thought that surely normal people were hiding in there. Man, was I wrong. Specifically, this moment refers to the first day in my second year creative writing class where a student I had never met, did not know the name of, and have never seen since, volunteered to read their poem out loud that colourfully described an abusive relationship. 

I remember hiding in my claimed corner of the Durham campus, eyes wide and mouth agape thinking “what the hell was that?”

Now, two problems arise from this. Ignoring the whole “time and place” argument which clearly was not considered beforehand, the rest of the students now had to offer criticism to someone’s deeply personal and vulnerable writing. With this person seemingly unable to separate person and poem, any negative feedback felt like it would be a personal attack against the “you’re so brave” commentary. I opted to keep quiet for the entire three hours.

I should mention that the poem was god awful. It was so bad. I can’t even begin to describe the horrid cliches and generic imagery used. Think Rupi Kaur if she used Chat-GPT. Many such cases.

What was now staring me down the barrel was the realization that this hope I had for my academic career would be god-near impossible. The incessant need to trauma dump because stories that are sad must be good overruled any hope of critical thinking.

When that seminar finished, I sat in my now-deceased Chrysler Sebring and stared blankly, trying to process the semester I was in for. I had chosen to specialize in creative writing in the hopes of meeting people who shared my passion and actually took it seriously—not to mention actually read books beyond Colleen Hoover’s entire bibliography. 

English majors, eh?

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A preface maybe should be warranted, but I’ve decided to just be an asshole instead. It goes without saying I am not speaking for the entire population of English majors on the planet, but there is a very specific tone I find in every single class I have taken in my nearly four years here: the incessant need to overshare. 

There can be a lot said about the state of the online realm and the access to strangers halfway across the world's most inner thoughts at any given moment, but it is without a doubt saturating the physical realm. When you exist in an online echochamber of “yes men” and anonymous faces claiming any sort of vulnerability as “art”, a dangerous snowball begins to gather speed.

This snowball presumes the classroom as an extension of said echochamber, and the given consent of its participants to workshop incredibly vulnerable pieces with potentially incredibly triggering content. 

These are strangers, mind you. Think about the worst thing that has ever happened to you, and now imagine telling it point-blank to a room full of half-hungover strangers with a few similes sprinkled in for flavour. It would be weird, right?

To me, it’s always felt like entitlement. To walk into a classroom dedicated to a creative workshop and foster a collaborative environment to then force a horrific part of your life in the face of other students is gross, uncalled for, and incredibly selfish—especially when it’s done badly. Don’t subject me to ignorant writing just to feed off your peers’ validation.

The point that I am trying to make through barred teeth is that just because something is sad, doesn’t mean it's intrinsically good. It feels extremely strange to have to sift through a stranger's childhood trauma and ignore their inner-demons to tell them their nightmares are full of comma splices and cliches. 

This is not to say any sort of vulnerability should be unwelcome just because I am a pretentious stick in the mud, but rather it is a glaring instance of “time and place,” and a second-year creative writing class on a Tuesday afternoon is not it. Perchance. 

Chronic oversharing is a disease. We all to some degree partake in this sickness on the interweb. It’s an inevitable part of the digital age, and having grown up on the internet causes a misunderstanding of boundaries both on and off screen. It may be fine to comment “where is your shirt from?” under a TikTok of someone exposing an abuser, but that lack of spatial awareness is not best suited for the mortal world. In the same vein, using a short story exercise to write a diss-track on your ex-girlfriend for all unwilling eyes to read is probably best kept to your dad’s dusty Yamaha guitar. 

One class, which shall remain nameless, frequently forfeited my attendance due to the lack of regulation in the oppressions olympics. Truly, it was concerning how much time was spent during my sparse appearances preoccupied with self-aggrandizing, circle jerk-esque discourse over one’s own personal struggles and overcoming of rather unfortunate circumstances—which is great to hear, just not when it’s costing me four years and thousands of dollars in debt. I would have rather talked about the book of the week that I bought with money from my bank account rather than dissect someone's trauma, but I guess you can’t win every battle.

Like I said before, a lot has changed since I first nursed this idea for an article. I feel like I’ve become somewhat less jaded as time has put distance between myself and a horrid past semester, and I am trying my hardest to walk into the new year a different person. I’ve purchased a leather bound academic planner so, you know, big things are coming. 

However, the one part of myself that hasn’t changed is the fundamental belief that I just think we should all know less about each other. I love humans, I love how special we each are, but I really could care less about the inner-workings of everyone’s lives. Your trauma is none of my business. Real life is not Text-to-Speech reading a Reddit post while Subway Surfers plays in the bottom half of the screen. Sometimes, boundaries are nice. Sometimes I just want to read James Baldwin and not have people compare their life to his character’s for three hours. Giovanni is not “giving brave,” you are just an idiot. 

Next time you feel the urge to tell your seminar that you too were locked in an attic much like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, consider the possibility that the universe might possibly revolve around someone else.