Communal shower thoughts: Supervisors

I was sitting with my laptop in my house of sorority, trying to focus on my themes while volunteer, sent by the chapter, to the drone on financial literacy in its mandatory presentation. It was quite easy to regulate it when he continued to repeat the same statistics until he started talking about personal life.

After all, I cannot say that I am more financially literate, but I could tell you a lot about this woman’s relationship with her husband.

Many times I am surprised by a stranger who told me a personal detail of life, especially one that does not throw them in the most positive light. As an unwanted gift, I don’t know what to do with the information and I want to return them.

On the other hand, the foreign life details that the woman chose to include made her presentation more interesting. I may not have been granted at the center of her presentation, but I was invested in dividing how this intelligent woman cannot be aware of the unequal nature of her marriage.

With the supervisors, I tend to be more caught up in the case of their comment than by the comment themselves. With the presenter, I constantly woke up to wonder: “Why do you tell me that?”

Why do people overlap? Maybe they don’t have many friends with whom they could give these stories. Or they may not lack social awareness to understand what it is and is not suitable for sharing with strangers.

These questions reach a bigger problem, the inability of people to have open and honest conversations with those around them. I wonder if the presenter talks about her obvious dissatisfaction with her husband’s perspective about women who work with her friends.

Maybe the presenter does not feel seen. There could be no one in her life to validate their struggles, nobody she is facing. Maybe she is so burdened by these relationship challenges that she could not confess them in a stranger.

It is important to be open with the people around you, especially if you want people to trust you. There is a reason why people say that vulnerability is a strength -I was offered access to information that I would never have been exposed to, but because people have felt comfortable in me.

I will never forget what one of my sister Sorrity told me in one of the first hot days of March, sitting on North Beach. He told me that he feels he could tell me anything and I will not judge it -that he is envious of the ease with which I talked about stigmatized topics.

All this means, I do not believe that my life is worse now, when I know who brings the presenter’s daughters to the dance class. Would I have liked her presentation to be shorter? Yes. I think she could improve what details to share in her presentations? Sure.

At the same time, I do not want to specify people far from supervising it, because I think there is a time and place for it. There is power in sharing our stories, perhaps not in a clearly uninvited strangers’ room.

Sylvie Slotkin is a Sophomore Medill. Can be contacted to (e -mail protected). If you want to publicly respond to this option, send a letter to the editor to (e -mail protected). The opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the opinions of all the members of the northern staff -the daily west.