I’ve been having serious issues with my classmates as of late. Be it from a wide variety of internalized insecurities or my uncontrollable ego (they work towards an equal but opposite outcome in my psyche), I can’t shake the feeling that I don’t understand what anybody is saying, at any given moment, on any particular subject.

I’m not necessarily the youngest person in all my classes, though in many classes I do find such to be the case. In those where I’m not, where I’m swimming in a sea of sophomores, I can usually identify the issue in my misunderstanding. Often I don’t know what anybody is talking about because I myself did not do my homework and did not read and my ability to half-ass my way through a discussion is faced by a much more well-read classmate.

In this case, the challenge is understood and the defeat is accepted. But it’s under another circumstance that I often find myself half-consciously staring into the back of a classmate’s head, unable to understand where the point being made is pointing to and what exactly I’m supposed to take from it. That is when a class discussion is “enhanced” or an effort is made to enhance the discussion with an outside of the class context.

The reality of the situation is unfortunate: I’m a premature English major who struggles to understand plenty of other concepts in the humanities, outside the sphere of English and literature. Philosophy is a blur of existential double-speak, concepts like race and gender studies are only crowning in the birth canal of my mind (ew), and history is exactly that, something I took a year ago and struggle to draw connections from in impromptu situations.

I know what I am: a big English-loving idiot. It’s terrifying because I know that part of being a good writer who can appeal to the masses, and not just 17-year-old girls who listen to The Smiths, is being able to draw in ideas and concepts and philosophies from all over. I want my writing to achieve not only a salty and sweet taste, but to have that umami.

Thus, it can be unnerving to see kids just one year my senior making these grandiose connections. If I can’t do it, why can they? I read through an infinite amount of Wiki pages a month, but when put on the spot about the whose-its and whats-its of a piece, I choke. What’s even more unnerving, and perhaps poses a greater threat to my inner-self, is not being able to even comprehend a discussion. I expect my professors to say things that I don’t necessarily get because they’ve had years more of experience than I and can provide an infinite amount of context for their itinerary of literary ideas. To be fair, they did make the syllabus.

However, to be in a class with a student who challenges the teacher, at times to draw the conversation in a different direction, but then also to at times be shut down by the professor, can feel jarring to my own notions of my intelligence. Is he/she being shut down because they’re wrong, or because the teacher can smell my confusion and registers that my own capabilities do not extend far enough to be able to conceptualize and benefit from the discussion? I feel stupid, and I hate feeling really stupid because I live in a constant state of feeling stupid which is then only amplified by the situational discomfort.

On the flip side, I also can’t help but wonder if they’re being shut down because they are verbally approaching the concept as I so often do with meditated thought, extensive research, and then eventually typed langue. Then, with absolutely no idea what I’m doing, I hope that whatever I am about to say makes sense to someone or anyone. The classroom, despite claims of safe space and community to all, is scary, and peers are predatory. I think we all just really want to feel like a good student; like we’re saying the right things and understanding the right ideas.