Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was exhilarated by being alive. She exemplified hyperbole, like many children her age. All aspects of her experience were catalogued in one of two ways – either the experience was the best thing that ever happened to her, or it was the worst thing that ever happened to her. She had no concept of perspective; she had experienced traumas that never grounded her hyperbolic nature. Her reaction to a fearful gerbil nipping her finger was stronger than her reaction to the beatings she endured.
“You’ll never know how much this hurts!”
Her laugh bubbled through her with abandon, the fearless expression of joy scintillating around her like fireflies in summer. She relished barefoot runs in the woods. She believed in fairies, magic, and intrinsic goodness. She loved fiercely and protected those she loved.
She was idealistic. She was fearless. She was free.
This little girl spent most of her time ravenously consuming the dreams of other people through literature, music, and visual performance. Her greatest pleasure was learning about other people – their thoughts, hopes, dreams, rationales, experiences, and preferences. Any of these things that she deemed beautiful she wove around herself like a tapestry. She became the manifestation of the people and characters she loved the most.
The little girl wanted to learn everything. She loved to travel, read, paint, listen, and observe. She craved the viewpoints of her peers and mentors to ground, validate, rationalize, or minimize her own. The little girl believed she could improve upon herself if she listened to the people she trusted. She believed people generally wanted to do the ‘right’ thing. She believed that love would always win. She believed that all people were connected, and that we all hold the same desires in our hearts.
Every piece of advice she had ever received molded her personality. Every criticism she received painted her face. Every scar, mark, bruise, and freckle reminded her of her own uniqueness. Uniqueness was her biggest shame because she always saw the sameness in her community. She had an uncanny ability to connect with people, find common ground in unsuspecting places, and unify those around her. The more she experienced, the more she evolved. The more she evolved, her community fell away.
This little girl dissolved in oceans of self-imposed isolation.
Throughout history people have enjoyed social commentary. We like observing each other, debating amongst ourselves, discerning our similarities and our differences. We categorize ourselves by everything: gender, race, age, religion, hair texture, eye color, coffee preferences, dietary choices, family size, birth order, sexual orientation, music tastes, make-up application, political affiliation, socio-economic status, and podcast subscriptions.
Social critiques contemplated by creatives of all varieties identify a unifying experience – no one is excluded from societal categorization. The proverbial ‘us’ versus ‘them’ has caused wars, defamation, and abuse throughout history. It has also unified communities, deified celebrities, disempowered tyranny, and absolved some injustices.
Some say categorization is an innate process, some say it’s learned.
I’ve been categorized, analyzed, labeled, and critiqued just like every other person I’ve met.
“I’m not special.”
Sometimes these superimposed narratives were so clearly articulated that I had no choice but to believe them. Hyper-detailed pictographic representations of the person I must be, as they were conceived of another.
“I wouldn’t lie to you.”
Other narratives I resisted because, quite simply, they were either unflattering or unrealistic. My ego did not fancy the metaphorical marquee on my forehead, calling me out for my bad behavior, flashing fluorescent light warning against my company. My ego equally loathed the disingenuous narrative that painted me more beautifully than I perceived.
“Don’t patronize me.”
The issue is that we all have a responsibility in our relationships. If we receive feedback from the other person, we have a seven-step procedure to follow if we wish to retain that relationship.
We must:
- Validate their emotions,
- Apologize for hurt feelings,
- Resist the urge to absolve ourselves through behavior rationalizations,
- Agree the other person is correct in their thinking,
- Validate their experience,
- Promise to improve and,
- Never repeat the mistake.
Dedication to these steps, fortified through sincerity and consistency, will preserve relationships. Trust will be rebuilt, and eventually forgiveness earned.
The most important aspect of this procedure is that your accordance, interpretation, or opinions are irrelevant. You may not defend yourself. You may not justify your actions.
Any perceived hesitancy or rebuttal, real or imagined, breeches this social contract.
Sometimes we are labeled by our community to determine our assigned roles. When people begin to deviate from their assigned roles, static can occur if that relationship is not love. That static could then result in the death of that relationship.
Let’s say there’s a clique of teenaged girls. In this group, the ‘pretty’ girl is named Jessica, and the girl with the ‘good personality’ is named Amy.
Let’s say Jessica notices that Amy loses a ton of weight over the summer, and generally has a ‘glow-up’. She learns how to style her hair in a flattering way, discovers her own sense of style, and she begins to radiate genuine beauty because she evolved into someone whom she’s proud to be. Jessica and her other friends in the group begin to perceive Amy as problematic. They begin to discuss Amy’s behavior whenever she isn’t around.
“Amy thinks she’s better than us now. Who does she think she is? She was nicer before she became so vain,” Jessica says. The rest of the friend group agrees, and they decide to confront Amy about her mistreatment of them.
Imagine that Amy didn’t do anything to her friends – it was only that her outward appearance had changed, and she was visibly and genuinely happier. Does Amy truly have a superiority complex like her friends think?
Of course not. She continued to treat her friends in the same way that she always did. However, because Amy was no longer performing her assigned role, the ‘girl with the good personality’, her friends decided to paint her as though she had a superiority complex because they now felt inferior to her.
Amy must now make a choice; she can either apologize to her friends in an attempt to preserve their relationship, or she could stick up for herself and ask them why they were accusing her of mistreatment.
Sometimes we disagree with the perceptions other people impose upon us. Sometimes we reject our assigned roles. Sometimes we become consumed with fear that their accusations are reality, and that we are too delusional and unwilling to see ourselves as we really are to avoid accountability. An unfortunate observation I have from my life experiences is that when people feel small, they push accusations on people they are intimidated by to ‘bring them back to Earth’. This section details traits that I have difficulty integrating and consolidating into my own mind.
I still haven’t decided whether I possess these traits.
If these superimpositions are accurate, I don’t want to possess these attributes. I would need to pull up my big-girl pants, be courageous, and turn my scrutinous gaze to the mirror. We can’t change if we run away from ourselves.
“Were those people just mean?” Maybe.
“Are these traits thrust upon me inaccurately?” Unlikely due to their frequency.
“If the same problem comes up with multiple people and you are the common denominator, the problem is you.” Probably.
In visual performance arts such as theater or movies, there is a distinction between drama and melodrama. The main difference between the genres is contextual. If the plot of the story results in realistic displays of emotion, the piece will be categorized ‘drama’. If the piece is ostentatiously orchestrated specifically to illicit strong emotional responses from the audience through hyperbolic exaggeration of goings-on, the piece will be classified as ‘melodrama’.
Melodrama can be defined as the characteristically larger-than-life experience, highlighting sensationalized exaggeration to manipulate emotional reactions from the audience. Common vernacular truncates this expression to ‘drama’ when scrutinizing a person or situation. Deductively and subjectively criticizing outbursts of emotion disharmonious with the event.
I have only heard this term reference feminine-presenting individuals visibly emoting. Etiquette, professionalism, and propriety demand composure and refrainment – any deviation is ostentatious and must be discouraged.
“You need to calm down.”
I propose to you now that a scenario is coined ‘drama’ when the observer lacks sympathy for the person emoting. If you truly care about someone else’s experience, you wouldn’t deem their displays of emotion as ‘dramatic’. You would sympathize with the person emoting; you would recognize that they were going through something. You would offer compassion because you recognized their pain, regardless of whether you can relate to the experience. Dramatics are accused only when the relationship lacks respect; the accuser believes that the person is ‘making mountains out of mole hills’.
“Dude, chill. It’s not that big of a deal.”
People cannot see outside of the lenses of their own experiences. It is reasonable to expect times in life when we see someone else having an emotional response that we do not believe we would have if we were presented with the same situation. Of course, this could only be hypothetical – we never truly know how we would react until the situation smacks us in the face. When these deviations exist, it is innate human impulsivity to classify the other experience as ostentatious, unnecessary, ridiculous, or dramatic.
Here’s a personal anecdote to illustrate this phenomenon.
My childhood best friend often had emotional outbursts with which I did not always understand. This wasn’t a critique of mine, because I never believed she was wrong for feeling the way she did, I was just acutely aware from a young age that I experienced things differently than my friends. My childhood trauma often manifested itself as calmness in serious situations. My dreams and interests were simplistic. My friends often exemplified the hyperbolic experience trademark of adolescence – and their frequent emotional outbursts taught me compassion for others. They had a zest for life that I never possessed. They felt their emotions deeply, and their uninhibited expression of their emotions mystified me. I often repressed and denied my own emotional expression, preferring to reserve my feelings for either solitude or clinical observation.
To preface this story, my friend had wanted to go to Disney World her entire life. This was very much a dream of hers. Frankly, her love of Disney was something to which I didn’t relate either. I hadn’t seen many Disney movies until I was in my late teens. These movies were foundational and formative experiences for her. They signified the innocence of childhood and the bittersweet nostalgia of being young and free of responsibilities. I was never an innocent child, and my consistent culpability absolved me of any potential nostalgia.
Her family didn’t make money in surplus; they were able to afford all of their ‘needs’ but there were a lot of ‘wants’ they couldn’t afford. One of the great resentments of her life was that she had gone through her childhood without having seen Disney World.
“They should have saved up money to go. They know how important this is to me!”
The absent money validated her fear.
“My parents must not love me. If they cared about me, they would have done anything to make sure I got to go.”
I thought her opinion of the situation was a bit harsh, but I never told her that. I knew that my dreams of having a family that loved me were similarly incomprehensible for her. I grew up in the foster care system. I had a unique understanding of what it was like to be an unwanted and unloved child. Her opinions around love always seemed insensitive to my own experience, but I never communicated that. I had been wrong about most of my perceptions, so I didn’t trust them anymore.
My friend had a doting family. She had never gone without familial love and for that reason, she took her family for granted. It would have been rude of me to remind her of such realities.
Fast forward to our early twenties. My friend’s aunt had called her the week before.
“I have a surprise for you!”
My friend was cautiously optimistic.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
“You’re going to Disney, babe! I bought tickets for you, your cousin, and me to go on a trip together. We leave next week!”
My friend was thrilled! Later that week, my friend came to visit me at my university for the weekend. We were getting ready for the day, and she told me all about her upcoming trip. She excitedly ran through their itinerary with me in-between pouncing her face with a makeup sponge. She was finally going to realize a lifelong dream.
She was painting her eyelids with her signature winged eyeliner when she received a phone call.
I heard her answer the phone. “Hey, what’s going on?” she asked.
Suddenly, I heard her scream.
“NOOOO!”
My friend collapsed onto the floor wailing inconsolably. She hung up the phone and threw it across the room.
I need you to understand that I have experienced a lot of tragedies in my life. Please understand that my brain immediately started preparing me for the worst. I thought someone in her family had either died or been in a serious accident because of the outburst of emotion I had just witnessed. I rushed over to her as I was very concerned, and I blurted out, “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“No, I am NOT okay. My aunt cancelled Disney!”
At this moment my whole body filled with such relief that I started laughing. I hated myself for laughing, and I immediately regretted it.
I’m very much the kind of person that laughs when they’re in a stressful situation. I laugh when I’m nervous, I laugh when I’m stressed, and I laugh when I’m relieved. Laughter is a defense mechanism. Laughter is medicine. Additionally, and genuinely, I laugh when things are better than I thought they were going to be. My sense of humor saved my life almost as often as it condemned me.
As I’m sure you anticipated, my friend did not appreciate the fact that I was laughing. She felt that I was mocking her and her pain.
“How dare you mock me at a time like this!”
I panicked and immediately tried to explain to her that I was not making fun of her, but that I was so relieved that everybody was okay. I apologized because I did not mean to make her feel invalidated.
“I’m so sorry. I never intended to hurt your feelings.”
My roommates and my friend were disgusted with my behavior.
“Can’t you see she’s hurting?”
“What is wrong with you?”
“Why are you so mean?”
After my apology, my friend hiccoughed that her cousin had misbehaved, so her aunt decided to cancel the trip to Disney World as punishment. My friend was furious that her cousin didn’t just ‘behave’ because the cousin understood the importance this trip represented to her, and she was just being selfish.
“Why couldn’t she have just behaved?!” Honestly.
This story illustrates a couple of things. My roommates and my friend agreed that I was dramatic because I thought that somebody had died. I was cruel for laughing and she deserved better from me in the future. Perception is reality, remember? It didn’t matter that I had not intended to hurt my friend’s feelings because I had. It was of no consequence that I had a different experience from the other six people in the room. Plurality would dictate that they were correct in their assumptions, and I was at fault. It was my responsibility to make reparations.
“Geez, what’s your problem anyway?”
“I thought we were friends, Michelle.”
Simultaneously, I had determined that my friend had been melodramatic because of her hysterical exclamations. I possessed every conviction that I would only have reacted in a similar manner if tragedy had occurred. My tragedies include death and dismemberment.
“Not everything has to be so maudlin, Michelle.”
“Why are you so dramatic?”
Her tragedies are what I would consider disappointments, therefore, I would have expected a lesser reaction from her.
“You don’t have to be cruel to her just because you don’t understand what she’s going through.”
And you know what? They were right.
I didn’t have to be cruel to her just because I didn’t understand her reaction. The truth of this situation continues to elude me however, because I didn’t perceive myself as cruel. Their perception of me was obvious; I was melodramatic. I intentionally and proverbially kicked my friend when she was already down. I was mean.
Disney World didn’t disappear, and she could go in the future if she wished. Fear not, dear reader, that pesky opinion of mine remained unarticulated. We haven’t spoken in years, and I sincerely hope she eventually travels to Disney (if she hasn’t already).
I present to you this anecdote as an explanation – a tribute to my internal struggle with the truth of who I am. Is there an accurate way to view this situation?
Do I possess an incorrect viewpoint? Is this my feeble attempt to avoid blame?
Was I mocking her?
Perfectionist Rehab 
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