It's Their Drama, Not Yours

Here's something I figured out recently: the drama belongs to them, not to me. By nature I like to fix things, and working in a helping profession only feeds that habit. So when somebody asks, "Did I hurt your feelings?" I have to stop and remember whose feelings we're actually talking about. Or the classic line: "You should have known I didn't want to do this in the first place." Followed by, "Why didn't you just let me off the hook?" Apparently I'm the villain for failing to read a mind that said yes while meaning no.

They agreed, they resented it, and now they're angry at you for not catching the hidden signal. The weight slides off their shoulders and onto yours. Suddenly you're the one feeling guilty, as if a storm cloud parked itself over your head and dumped rain on you alone. They walk away lighter. You're stuck holding a role in a production you never auditioned for and certainly didn't deserve.

Picture an evening where you genuinely enjoyed yourself and assumed everyone else did too. Then you find out otherwise. Whose fault is that, exactly? Not yours. If they were miserable, why not say so hours earlier instead of saving it for the postmortem? Same thing happens with food. Say you track down a recipe, cook it carefully, and feel proud that it turned out well. Afterward one guest mentions the dish contained something that made them sick, something you supposedly should have anticipated, even though they never reminded you and ate it anyway.

Another person at the table smiled through the whole meal, complimented it, then let slip later that casseroles aren't really their thing because they're a meat-and-potatoes sort. Translation: you prepared a good meal for a pair of ingrates. Hours of effort for that. And now you're irritated, when a minute ago you felt fine. Is irritation contagious? Drama pulls more drama toward it. There are people who can't relax until everyone around them is just as miserable.

Maybe drama works like an illness. Though not every version of it is bad; sometimes what spreads is happiness and good news. Think about someone announcing a pregnancy. Then you notice one guest in the room who can't conceive, or who went through in vitro fertilization, finally had a baby, and lost that child to SIDS. The announcement lands like a wet blanket, and now the person sharing the news feels terrible for having brought it up at all.

Some people build the whole scene on purpose. I knew of a woman who set out fragile glass perfume bottles on her coffee table, and nearly the first thing she did was point them out to the toddlers in the room. If she'd left those bottles alone, the kids might never have gone near them. Now they will. Odds are good one or two shatter, probably the priciest ones. The reward in drama is huge, and she gets to stand there looking perfectly innocent while no one else realizes she arranged the entire thing.

There was a post before this one, "Leave the Drama to the Lama," worth going back to. Emotions travel from person to person, and not usually the pleasant ones. Have you ever walked out of a gathering once an argument caught fire? Some of those scenes leave you rattled, almost shell-shocked, the way PTSD can. It's exactly the mechanism that makes soap operas addictive. What chaos comes next? The better move is to settle yourself down. Put on music that calms you, go walk through a park, slip out and get back to wherever you felt good. If a friend had a nasty cold, you wouldn't lean in, kiss them, or sip from their glass. You'd keep your distance from the germs, so keep the same distance from someone's drama.

Fiction is a different animal. Drama in a film or a novel can be a pleasure precisely because you know it isn't unfolding in the room with you. It might startle you, crack you up, or get you crying, and underneath it all you understand none of it is real. People who take stories to heart sometimes steer clear of certain kinds, and that's fair. For me it's horror. Real life supplies plenty of frightening material already. Anyone been watching the news lately?

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