A few weeks ago, I submitted a poem for a workshop at around 10 p.m. I’d revised it, refined it, read it out loud to myself and my friends — I was ready to submit. This was a pretty busy week for me: various responsibilities for The News-Letter, creeping philosophy deadlines, a growing pile of history readings. So, when I emailed my poem to my entire class, I didn’t review it. I submitted it. Then I turned to my readings, called my friends, and went to sleep. Everything was alright. My poem was okay, and I’d submitted it by 11:59 p.m.
Unbeknownst to me, however, I, with that one click of an Outlook “Send,” ended up submitting four pages of drafts on this poem with all my personal thoughts on the subject matter: my ex-boyfriend. I was blissfully unaware of this for a while. But when workshop rolled around two weeks later, I realized my mistake. I’m sure you can imagine my horror when my professor kindly asked if I intended to submit the whole four pages or if it was just the first page I hoped to workshop.
I didn’t submit four pages, I said.
Yeah, you did, my classmate confirmed.
Oh.
Now, the best way to recover from this is to acknowledge that what’s done is done and to realize that my classmates do not know me very well and likely forgot about this anomalous workshop a few hours later. I, however, did not. And this draws attention to a part of me that is particularly sensitive to embarrassment, especially unwanted personal revelation.
I have written about this before, albeit from a different perspective. I’ve mentioned my struggles with sharing, but in the abstract — a kind of vague discomfort with vulnerability. I’ve never talked about what I think would happen if I shared my emotions, my thoughts about people, my memories of my ex-boyfriend. My concrete wall is insurmountable, fortified and unscalable because I’m worried that if someone were to cross it, they would find something radically embarrassing.
Well, despite this, in my fatigue-induced absent mindedness I chopped a whole doorway through that wall with one click of an overconfident hand, inviting a flood of potential humiliation.
If you really think about it, it’s not a big deal. Submitting internal thoughts about an ex-boyfriend to my poetry class is embarrassing, yes, but more funny than damaging. Despite my heightened embarrassment at the time, I will forget about it, just like my classmates who have likely (hopefully) forgotten about it by now. But maybe, possibly, it’s a good thing — especially for me.
I am someone who struggles to share her personal thoughts. So, maybe the best thing for me is to have those thoughts accidentally revealed to a group of people I don’t really know. Not because the outcomes of this specific event will be ideal — my classmates now know all my personal thoughts about relationships and my strange way of finding ideas for my poems. But it will be helpful because it has taught me, and will continue to teach me, that sharing isn’t so bad, and that when it does happen — albeit unintentionally — it isn’t that important. It’s eventually forgotten. In simple words: it’s not that deep. And every day that passes when I forget about it, preoccupied instead with all the pressing things that do matter, I realize that maybe sharing isn’t so bad after all. If I can reveal my personal thoughts about my ex-boyfriend that showcase the strange and often embarrassing inner workings of my writerly pursuits, and if I can write about this experience without reliving it and agonizing over it, then maybe sharing isn’t that big of a deal after all.
There is so much that puts these minor moments of temporary humiliation in perspective. I am learning to realize that this tiny, insignificant bit of unwanted sharing is, though momentarily embarrassing, so minor an experience to agonize over. That it’s something to laugh at and forget, and, most importantly, that sharing maybe isn’t so scary after all.
Lana Swindle is a sophomore from Princeton, N.J. majoring in Writing Seminars. She is a News and Features Editor for The News-Letter. Her column views her everyday experiences from a different perspective.
