Finally, the end of term has very nearly arrived, and I am definitely looking forward to switching off for a while. I have spent the last week frantically catching up with postponed deadlines, agreed back when Week 8 seemed like a Mayan doomsday date that would never really arrive, which made accumulating entertaining anecdotes about anything other than the ontology of language a bit of a stretch.

When ‘On-Tology’ was vetoed, I returned to the drawing board. After recently misunderstanding a survey and submitting several deceitful answers, which somehow resulted in an application for an internship at a Canadian bank, On-tario was also looking like a contender. Ultimately, I decided to stick to what I know (which does not extend to a career in investment banking in Canada) and tackle yet another abstract and digressive concept for the final week. But the pun game perseveres, and I landed on honesty.

As I’m sure many of you will be doing, I have been forced to look back at the whole previous year and use this retrospective to create a productive plan for exam season (currently my ‘productive plan’ is panic). Delighted though I am to finally be cycling to Sidgwick in dappled sunshine, the move into spring marks the fact that it may be time to get serious. The time to be honest with yourself about what has been done and what you have yet to do is rapidly approaching.

More often than I am proud of, I have to remind myself to ‘respond to what is actually happening, not what you want to be happening’. Whether it be lying to my DoS about how dandy everything is while being too scared to check my Hermes inbox, or having sincere and heartfelt conversations in my head with people rather than finding the ability to do so in person, I know how thrifty I can be with the truth. I am duplicitous. I think we all are. I really don’t feel much need to apologise for it. Often the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ mentality works. Nevertheless, I find it very entertaining that, while we value sincerity and truthfulness, we abhor ‘over-sharing’.

Over-sharing is a criticism predominantly made of women. It is one that carries with it accusations of impropriety, excessive importance placed on one’s self-image, and a mistaken belief that people would care about what you have to say. It’s an inane criticism, especially in a society where we are increasingly narrowly self-interested, and the reason it is so often associated with women is the symptom of a society which chronically undervalues the female experience.

I am a huge over-sharer. I will happily recount the intimate details of my life with nearly anyone. I once had to get the morning after pill, and what should have been a stressful and regrettable experience quickly became me using the standardised NHS Yes/No questions posed by the nurse to structure an epic narrative of my relationship status over the past 18 months. I may have delayed a pensioner getting their prescription, but I enjoyed myself, and I like to think the nurse did too.

What’s more, I am always instantly enamoured with fellow over-sharers, hence why I have replicated it here. Within these columns I have been honest to an extent that might make some readers (my mother) uncomfortable. Honesty can be cruel: perhaps this is manifested in the bitter attitude I have taken towards previous paramours – sorry, but most of you deserved it – but it really is the only means of creating a relationship.

I am proud to say I have matured sufficiently to lose interest in ‘playing the game’ after realising that it is neither durable nor worthwhile to continue chasing people whose interest in you is proportionate to how much time you wait to text back, or how opaque you make your intentions.

Instead, my friends and I have adopted a mantra of ‘don’t play hard to get when you’re already hard to want’ – an apparently self-deprecating but actually self-preserving tactic of walking away before becoming lost in the labyrinth of the game. Admittedly these are the same friends whose other aphorisms about dating include ‘I’m bored, you’ll do’, and thus are not to be upheld as moral arbiters, even if they do hold positions of power in Cambridge’s philanthropic scene.

Really, it all boils down to a knowledge of oneself that doesn’t give a shit about what others are going to think. These columns have been indisputably self-indulgent rants. I like to think it gives them an edge of spontaneity or, failing that, hysteria. I haven’t replicated some of the politically insightful and astute commentary of my fellow columnists. I don’t understand Brexit, but I do know how it feels to fancy people who do bad things or to disobey your better intentions (which might be a good set up for a segue into a quip about Brexit – I sincerely would not know).

Narcissistic? Sure. But, like my fellow students who are seeking ‘sugar daddies’ to fund their studies, I only have myself to sell. If you don’t want it, don’t buy it. Honestly, I am proud to be a woman with a misguided sense of self-confidence, one who doesn’t know when to shut up, and doesn’t want to either.