Why I Do Drama.
The problem with “drama” is that it too often is a synonym for “This makes me uncomfortable.”
As in, “There may be something ugly lurking about here, but I don’t want to have to think about it.”
Which, you know, I get. I don’t always feel like trudging into the latest storm of accusations, nor do I have the energy to figure out who’s saying what about who. There are idiots around who get peevish about entirely ridiculous things. It’s tiring sometimes, and we should all have the right to say, “Okay, I just need to peace out.”
Yet what I don’t do is hold my unwillingness to engage with potentially ugly issues as a personal strength – as in, “I don’t do drama.”
Not doing drama occasionally, or even as a matter of course? Understandable. Never doing drama, however, is another way of saying, “I don’t care who gets fucked over, I just want peace.” And that thinking leads to all sorts of abuses being swept under the rug because, you know, we don’t want to think about who’s being violated or ignored or discriminated against, we just wanna show up and chill.
Saying you never do drama means that you’ll tolerate any harm so long as people are quiet about it.
That’s its own special form of evil. And I don’t do that.
EDIT: To clarify, when I originally posted this elsewhere, one commenter said, and I believe accurately: “I think so much of this conversation is being had around the idea that there is a simplistic view we can take on the distinction between what is drama and what is not.”
To which my response was: “Pretty much. Almost any definition in here of ‘That’s drama!’ can be applied – and *has* been applied – to someone who’s genuinely been injured by another party and is trying to cause change. I feel when that distinction is made as though it were easy, it tends to lead to dangerous shortcuts.
“I note with heavy irony that the people who are like ‘WE ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO PLAY JUDGE AND JURY’ often feel qualified to judge which people are frivolous in their intent.”