Changing the Subject

Lately, while I grading essays, I've noticed an odd pattern emerging.  My students, low ability to high, have begun--for no apparent reason--to move the subject of their sentences to the end, beginning with the object or a modifying phrase, anything that isn't what the sentence is about.  I don't know who told them this was an interesting writing technique or that it would somehow make their sentence construction more enjoyable to read, but I'm guessing it must have been taught by someone at some point given its widespread usage among my classes.

And while this disturbs me to no end, I can't seem to stop them from doing--and I've started doing it, too.  What happened to good old declarative sentences?

I am hungry.  I am going to eat a sandwich.  It will be made of meats and cheeses.  I am referencing the film "Bridesmaids."  and so on.

While my students are mixing up their words in a vain attempt--I think--to sound smarter than they are, it occurs to me that we--collectively (all you humans out there and me)--have become so complicated in our rhetoric, so intent on moving things around, so skilled at changing the subject, that we may not have real conversations much any more.

I'm focused on this because I have, of late, had some of the most real conversations of my life.  Hard ones that have involved tears and clenched fists, averted eyes and whispers.  The kinds of conversations people have to have, absolutely have to have, if meaningful change is ever going to occur--but they're also the kinds of conversations no one and I mean no one wants to have willingly.  It's just so damn much easier to joke and laugh, to evade and hedge, to hide and keep silent.

Maybe what my students are doing is burying what they really want to say because they are afraid of saying it wrong, so they've concocted this twisted structure that allows them to ease you into their point of view, to seduce you with a subordinating conjunction and a prepositional phrase before hitting you with a statement so wildly true that it nearly knocks you breathless.  Maybe they are trying to show me how hard it is for them to say what they feel or think because no one has ever allowed them to do that before.  And maybe, given my own recent conversations, I really get it.

I know the impulse to apologize for having a feeling, to ask for forgiveness for expressing myself, to dismiss my own needs and wants as unnecessary, to change the damn subject just so that I don't make anyone else uncomfortable, but I don't want to do it anymore.  I want to be uncomfortable, I want to squirm and itch and worry and wonder and say what I need to say anyway, certain that the receiving ears won't shut down, walk out, turn deaf.  I want to stick to the subject, to be brave, to put my feelings first and to believe I am enough, just as I am, and that anyone who can't take what I have to say isn't worth the effort.

And I want you to feel that way, too.

Imagine how lovely the world could be if we all just sat back, open our hearts and minds, our mouths and ears, and vowed to listen as well and as hard as we spoke, and to never, even when it gets hard, change the subject.