I was sitting with my laptop in my sorority house trying to focus on my homework while a volunteer, sent by the chapter, droned on about financial literacy in her mandatory presentation. It was fairly easy to tune her out when she kept repeating the same statistics until she started to talk about her personal life.

In the end, I can’t say I’m more financially literate, but I could tell you a lot about this woman’s relationship with her husband.

I’m often taken aback by a stranger telling me a personal life detail, especially one that does not cast them in the most positive light. Like an unwanted gift, I find myself not knowing what to do with the information and wanting to return it.

On the other hand, the extraneous life details the woman chose to include made her presentation a lot more interesting. I may not have been tuned into the focus of her presentation, but I was invested in piecing together how this smart woman could be unaware of her marriage’s inegalitarian nature.

With oversharers, I tend to be more caught up on the instance of their comment than the comment itself. With the presenter, I constantly found myself wondering, “Why are you telling me this?”

Why do people overshare? Maybe they don’t have many friends whom they could be hashing these stories out with instead. Or maybe they lack the social awareness to understand what is and is not appropriate to share with strangers.

These questions get at a larger issue, people’s inability to have open and honest conversations with those around them. I wonder if the presenter talks about her obvious grievances with her husband’s perspective on working women with her friends.

Maybe the presenter doesn’t feel seen. There could be nobody in her life who validates her struggles, nobody she confides in. Maybe she is so burdened by these relationship challenges that she couldn’t help but confess them to a room of strangers.

It is important to be open with people around you, especially if you want people to trust you. There is a reason people say vulnerability is a strength — I have been afforded access to information I never would have been exposed to but for the fact that people felt comfortable confiding in me.

I will never forget what one of my sorority sisters said to me on one of the first warm days in March, sitting on North Beach. She told me she felt like she could tell me anything and I wouldn’t judge her — that she was envious of the ease with which I spoke about stigmatized subjects.

All this is to say, I don’t fundamentally believe my life is worse now that I know who brings the presenter’s daughters to dance class. Would I have liked her presentation to be shorter? Yes. Do I think she could refine what details to share in her presentations? Sure.

At the same time, I don’t want to caution people away from oversharing, because I do think there is a time and place for it. There is power in sharing our stories, just maybe not in a room of clearly uninvested strangers.

Sylvie Slotkin is a Medill sophomore. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.