"I'm offended" is officially the new "literally". Back in 2010 no one could finish a sentence without unnecessarily inserting "literally" into it at least twice and now in 2016 suddenly everyone is offended by everything. Us millennials tend to have a reputation for being delicate people who run to their parents for anything and everything and this whole "offended" trend really isn't helping us out.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying no one is allowed to ever in their life be offended, what I'm saying here is that be offended when you are genuinely insulted for a serious reason, not when someone disagrees with you or shares a varying opinion from your own. The entire world is becoming censored because people are becoming oversensitive to everything and all we're doing here is blocking out the world and changing it to how we want it to be.

I've been hearing people use the phrase more and more frequently over the last year but the first time it really irritated me was this spring in an English class I was taking called Ethnic American Literature. The description of the class explained that we would be reading texts by various writers who had backgrounds of hardship and struggle with either being in America or coming to America from a foreign country. The professor indicated that we would be discussing rather upsetting details as there were some true and some fictional stories based on facts so I got the sense that it would be a class with great, hard to read literature. That being said, halfway through the class we read a novel that was set during the time of the Viet Nam war, mood of the novel self explanatory. One day we were discussing it in class and a student raised her hand and said to the professor "I don't think we should be talking about stuff like this in class because it could easily be offensive to a lot of people". When I heard those words out of her mouth I had to bite my tongue so I didn't scream that it's history. The professor handled it well but that comment bothered me for the rest of the week.

That was incident number one. Incident number two occurred at an unsuspecting location: the oral surgeon's office. Me, my mom, my brother, and my sister all went in to talk to the surgeon regarding our wisdom teeth removal and were each presented with a booklet with all the details. On one of the last pages there were reasons listed that most people should have them removed, one of which was stated as "diseases". We all questioned the vagueness of that bullet point and the surgeon responded with "well it used to say cancer but because we're all raising our children to be delicate snowflakes nowadays so they decided to change it to diseases because apparently that's less offensive". That moment was the last straw for me. Seriously? Now just the word cancer is offending people?

Millennials, we have to stop this trend because we're giving ourselves a bad rep. People are going to look back in history and we're going to be viewed as the generation that couldn't handle anything, which is just lame. State your opinions and listen to other people's too, don't block things out that are uncomfortable, listen to the situation and learn about it, sometimes being uncomfortable is necessary for change, and just stop saying you're offended unless someone has really truly said or done something awful to you. As a generation, can we please stop overusing the phrase "I'm offended"? At this point I would take four "literally's" per sentence. So get out there and start being uncomfortable, you'll learn a lot and grow significantly.