The Drama

Do you like the drama? The turmoil? The soaring highs and the bottomless lows? The agony? I have always had a propensity for drama and fervor.

When I was younger and more unhealthy, I’d nudge myself into situations where I knew I’d get hurt just because I liked the intensity of it all. I stared out the window and pretended my life was a movie; I’d even divide it into chapters. When I went through dark and painful times, I would think things like, “This will make fantastic writing material.” And boy, did I write. It was tortured, ecstatic, flowery, excessive.

The height of my melodrama was sometime in eighth grade. I was a painfully shy girl who avoided eye contact and wrote hysterical poetry in a shabby composition notebook. I made every English assignment into an opportunity to talk about how frail and forsaken I was, or how tragic it was that I was born so different in a plastic society. Every moment of every day was like a drop of drama, funneled into a little vat in my thirteen-year-old soul. The drama in that vat was always boiling, boiling, sometimes bubbling over as sonnets into the margins of my math quizzes.

I grew out of it and gained some common sense. You know, like understanding that the world doesn’t revolve around my problems. The drama no longer defines me. It is now more akin to ribbons of gristle in a slab of meat. And just like how a little fat makes a wonderful steak, a little melodrama makes the most splendid writing.