Same Shit. Different Day.
When I was a teenager, like so many teenagers (I think it's a job requirement), I was a bit, um, dramatic. I was a drama queen. Everything was about me, or had to do with me. That butterfly flapped its wings in China to make some point to me.
And then I grew up, met my wife, bought the house (no white picket fence, but it was there symbolically), had a stable career (at the time, in hindsight.. well...), and was settled and happy, for the most part. Life, of course, had its difficulties. It was life, after all. But for the most part, I was content with my life and fairly drama free.
In hindsight, it could have been because I was living with a woman who, instead, drew and created all the drama. Because she was the drama queen, I had to be the stable one who was not dramatic. I'm not sure.
I had always liked to think, instead, it was about me getting to a place of maturity where I knew it didn't have to be all about me. Where I was comfortable enough that I didn't have to whine and complain my way through life.
Then the life I had built fell apart. Huge crash - earthquake, tsunami um.. wait, I'm detecting a pattern here. Let's just say there was a "dramatic" end. And I have worked hard to make sure that this particular event in my life does not define my life. But I know, on occasions, it most certainly does. Whether I want it to or not.
It is hard to step back outside of your life and see if you are being a drama queen. When you're in the midst of the drama, it feels perfectly normal and understandable that the world IS out to mess particularly with you. It is easy to see the drama in others, but not so much in you.
I wonder, sometimes, whether we create the drama (and by we, I mean "me" - aren't you paying attention? It's all about me!) specifically to be interesting. Let's face it. Your friend tells you everything is wonderful in her life, and you're bored. You don't want the lovely details of their cool vacation rubbed in your face. You don't want to know that she just got a raise, and her partner does more than 50% of the chores. There is something inherently interesting - to a point- about drama.
The reality is that about 80-95% of our lives (made up statistic) are boring. We get up. We shower, get dressed, ideally eat breakfast, pack our bags, go to work, drop off kids, (probably not in that order), clean house and do chores, go to soccer practice or baseball practice, exercise ideally, watch way too much television, eat lunch and dinner in there somewhere, and then crash to sleep at night. And then we get up and we do it all over again. And many of us seem to do this every day without incident.
Many of us seem to do it without complaining about our spouses, our jobs, our kids, our houses, our cars, the traffic, our co-workers, the weather, the price of gas (oh, who am I kidding? We *all* complain about the cost of gas!), the laundry, the dog, the plumbing. We get up every day and lead responsible lives. And then get up again the next day and do the same thing.
I don't want to live an overly dramatic life. But I can't seem - at the moment, at least - to lead the same boring life day after day, either. How do you find contentment on the treadmill of life? How do we find satisfaction when it's the same shit, just a different day?
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