Personal Encounter With Forced Expression

A reflective narrative on individuality, discomfort, and the limits of enforced creativity.

Group of people outside modern building

Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone

In a spirit of self-improvement upon my final semester preceding an engineering degree, I ventured into unfamiliar territory by choosing a course in voice training offered by the theater department.
Hardly had the first class begun when the eagerly smiling young teacher decreed that we were about to embark on an educational adventure entitled "explosion tag." The rule of the game was this: whenever you were tagged by the person who was "it," you had to erupt with a howl or a scream or some other wordless vocal explosion by means of which to initiate yourself in some kind of radically uninhibited new condition of mind and voice-a new dimension of self-liberation that earned you the role of "it."

Submission to the Moment

I took a dim view of this all-too avant-garde inspiration. At the price of seeming a humorless person to some, I consider mandatory asinine behavior a violation of personal space. And yet at the onset of explosion tag, I automatically succumbed along with everyone else to a mass display of social emergency grins that signified our submission to the agenda (though soon I was not quite following instructions). I should have just walked out the door. A most embarrassed "Nothing really!" was the only vocal reaction that I was able to muster on failing to avoid being tagged. (A Bronx cheer would have served as the class act for that occasion, had I thought of it in time.) And then in the course of the pseudo-spontaneous monotony, one confused young man attempted originality by slapping another guy in the face-not a terribly violent smack, though still a bad enough one to arouse a groaning "Ohhh!" of wretchedly grinning objection from the rest of the crowd. Nevertheless, our mentor allowed the show to proceed until most of the class had been duly exploded.
Students attentively listening to a lecture
People socializing in a community center

Choosing a Different Path

There followed after the explosion tag a most egregious tongue-protrusion exercise, the story of which I spare the reader.
When the class was over at last, I began to ponder those events with mounting disgust and bewilderment. One day later, I dropped the ludicrous humanities course and fled to a math course I luckily found still open, the non-human grace of the latter affording a healthier break for humanity as far as I was concerned.