Your mama doesn't need the drama either.

Lets talk about drama, real negative, unnecessary drama. The kind that makes you feel ill feeling toward someone for no reason other than the things people are saying. Or the moments when information about someone else is brought to your attention, when it has nothing to do with you or the person telling you. The times when someone else's actions could potentially cause you harm or ruin your reputation among your peers. How about the times when people take a simple or uneventful moment and spin it for entertainment purposes at your expense? I've been wrapped up in, a victim of, and affected by these kinds of drama in recent past and I've had about enough of it.


I'm not sure why people choose to act this way, but, unfortunately, I've found is so common around me that, I've not realized I was engaging in it before it was too late. People love to hear about when someone isn't doing well in life, to gossip and pass judgment about other people's life styles and choices, and take other people's private moments and make them the topic over wine at parties. About a year ago, I made a personal promise not to talk about situations or people when I'm not involved in them. I found that people fish for information about other people and sometimes it is difficult to tell when it is happening because it's weaseled into conversations too often. More times than not, I stopped myself from engaging, which was what I hoped for when I made myself that promise.

My social life has been affected a lot by people talking about me in a negative light, taking minuscule moments and blew them out of proportion, talking about things I shared with them in private, and basically coming up with things that make me look or seem bad, which aren't true. I've found that over the last few years, I have very few people I call friends who will actually keep our conversations private, with or without saying "Don't repeat this" as I'm talking. Due to this issue, I developed a few ways to tell who was talking about me. I sometimes tell only certain people, in certain circles, things about my life, and wait to find out who else knows about it later. This one is pretty basic, but, I ask where people heard things from, you'd be surprised who the leaks end up being and how many people don't mind telling you who told them (because its more potential drama!). The last one is falling back into being private and only sharing things that matter to me with those who have proven their trust over time, which isn't so much fun when you're trying to create close friendships. But, not everyone deserves to be a close friend, so I've learned. 

In the terms of drama at my expense, I have to be honest, when I hear people saying or doing things that are directed towards me, I get defensive and confused about why its happening. My desire for everyone to like me causes a paranoid reaction to come out of me. I try to figure out what I did to cause them to choose me as a target. I also get upset that people would rather talk about a small mistake I made and make it a huge deal, rather than the successes and great transitions I've gone through. It really hurts my feelings that the person who seemed so genuine and was so interested in sharing conversation, picked apart the information they got out of me and spread the things that are less that flattering, to interested ears, which was their agenda from the start. I am far from a perfect person, so there is plenty for people to gossip about. But, I still wonder.... Why?

Regardless, when I think about all of the drama and gossip that my name has been involved in, I realize that I truly don't care. I acknowledge the moments I engaged in drama/gossip I was either trying to continue the conversation so the person would like me, feeling insecure about my life, or being a negative person. I try very hard to keep all of that stuff in my past and a blip on the map of my life. I am not someone who cares what someone I don't know is doing or the juicy private information that no one else was meant to hear. So, I'm not going to engage it.

I am ready for the next step in my self positivity and evolution, which is not caring what people are saying about me and not reacting to or engaging with the situation if I find out about it or someone tries to bring it into my life. Which is difficult because often the story about myself or my life is very far from the truth and I would love for it to at least be true and defend my self. Which seems like an acceptable reaction to lies, but, too often the person who is delivering the information wants that sort of event to then take back to the hive and just talk more about it. So, I am also not going to allow other people to bring drama based negativity into my life and be more verbal about my boundaries by not engaging in conversation and saying so. This is also difficult because I really want people to like me and often when you don't engage, or make people feel bad for it, they stop talking to you. But, thats a price I'm willing to pay. Not that I need those kinds of people in my life anyway.... But, this is going to be a real challenge. Wish me drama free!

xoxo