This article invokes narrative to demonstrate the value of encouraging and interacting with students' personal writing within the composition classroom. Dreyer starts by identifying herself as a compulsive eater and discloses her anxieties about her body, and further, how they relate to writing and teaching. She uses feminist theory to equate the excess of weight with the excess of voices--the less scholarly and more personal voices that infringe upon her writing--and the urge to revise through paring down such excess instead of embracing the unique perspective her personal experience could offer as an extension of self within academic discourse. While reflecting on these struggles and how they impacted her time as a graduate teaching assistant, she also recounts a relationship she formed with one of her first students, Angela. Angela turned in free writing responses indicating a current struggle with compulsive eating as well. Blurring the boundaries between what Dreyer considers the typical detached teacher-student relationship, she writes back to Angela confessing her own struggle and the two begin a dialogue about their experiences, carried out in free written journal entries over the course of a semester. Dreyer includes several of these exchanges within the article to show how her willingness to become a confidante and share her own experiences helped Angela to grow more comfortable with her identity as a writer and more open to incorporating personal experiences into her texts, ultimately demonstrating that the humanizing of both instructor and student through empathy, validation, and self-disclosure in the composition classroom enhances the teaching of writing. (Virginia Harris)