I may not know you, but I know about your unresolved family trauma.

In my first few months at college, I’ve had much time to reflect. Why was I passionately telling relative strangers about my opinions on Jessie J threatening to release new music in the smoking area of Tramline? Who exactly was it that told me their five year plan that one Tuesday in a Costa during Freshers Week? And how, time and time again, have I found the opportunity to make a reference to the puppets-themed episode of Glee in a completely inappropriate context? 

Oversharing during the first month of college is a dangerous and beautiful aspect of the student experience that often gets overlooked amidst the hustle and bustle of college life, but it is a phenomenon that has deeply affected all of us in some way or the other.

The Oxford English dictionary hilariously yet aptly sums up oversharing as “the act of giving more information than people want to hear about your personal life.” By this definition, simply sharing personal information with another stranger is not technically enough to qualify as having overshared – one must have crossed the reasonable line of social awareness in the information they chose to divulge.

But what is it that leads us all (and we’re all guilty ) to cross this line? From my perspective, there’s a certain something about the combination of new modules, fresh faces and sheer audacity that triggers a gut reaction within us to confide all our secrets to unsuspecting individuals.

Indeed, many of us are still recovering from these interactions which infested college for the first month – and rightly so. As I’m pretty sure Lady Gaga once said, there can be 100 people in a room, and 99 respect your boundaries, but all you need is for one person to wildly overstep these boundaries to send you into a turbulent spiral of confusion, pity, and regret. 

Now, while this oversharing is understandably unsettling and undeniably unsolicited, there is an element to it that is more nuanced and complex.

If one breaks down the concept of oversharing to its simplest form, it involves party A confiding in party B. The chaotic content of A’s confessions usually stuns/repulses/traumatises B to the point where they lose focus on the fact that they were the one chosen by A as the worthy recipient of their oversharing.

All my Bs out there should be proud of the fact that, out of all the people in the room, they were the one that A thought looked approachable enough to permanently scar with an intense depiction of their family dynamics. We get so caught up in the outrageously feral nature of the confession that we don’t stop to think – maybe this particular A needed to get this off their chest.

As the first month of college ended, and social consciousness slowly dawned upon everyone, oversharing ceased and waned to such an extent that it became a spectacle for it to occur, not an ordeal everyone was simply subject to just by existing.

As relationships developed, and we got to know each other, we realised we weren’t oversharing anymore, we were just sharing. Despite this realisation, however, no-one forgot those who overshared to them in that first month. Who wouldn’t be somewhat jarred by a stranger trauma-dumping about their failed TY mini company…? On the Luas.

The reality is that while oversharing is still a natural element in the life of a college student, there seems to be an underlying consensus that it should largely be something we keep behind us. Yet this is not to say that we cannot retrospectively show empathy to those who overshared to us, as I hope the entire smoking area of Tramline can show empathy to me.

We are all both As and Bs, who spiralled together in a chaotic mess of the unadulterated truth for approximately a month, and I, for one, think that’s beautiful.