We all just want to be full of complicated layers that take great effort to unpeel and make others overwhelmed and teary eyed as each layer unfolds. There is no charm left in the childlike simplicity of a potato that just innocently sits there with a look that says ‘I’m the most predictable, harmless thing in the world, I have nothing up my sleeve, you can just eat me’. That’s it, no drama, no complications. Our older generations had quite a few proud potatoes. Life went on at its regular pace without any dramatic twists and turns. Not so much anymore, we new age onions thrive on drama. We are not content with being single or committed, we want to be ‘Its complicated’. We may live comfortable cheery lives but we want to say ‘my life is messed up’. The only thought in our heads may be the toppings we want on our pizza tonight, but we want people to believe that we are soulful brooding creatures, who silently battle a hundred storms a day.
We say we don’t, but secretly, we love Drama
Don’t lie, my friend, you know we do! We like to create our own tragedy, drown in self-pity over that tragedy, be the hero who ‘survives’ the tragedy and finally get a standing ovation from the audience for our great achievement (in most cases it’s just a sitting sigh from our friends who know us too well). A boss’s reprimand for not meeting a deadline turns us into a Facebook life coach with a post that reads “I have already been through hell, so give it your best shot, I will still win, I will survive”. One could have won already had one finished that report. One could get a hundred likes for this post, but one still has to finish that report. Break ups transform us into the great Antony mourning his eternal lost love for Cleopatra. It lasted six months, you fought six hundred times. There was no war that stopped your everlasting union, it was the natural thing to happen between two ill-suited adults. No layers to unpeel, it’s a potato scenario. I know it sounds harsh, I know sometimes our problems overwhelm us. I’m not trying to trivialize life and its issues. Of course, sometimes life does hand us battles, but, most of the time its just little hitches and hiccups. In our heads, we turn these into big wars that need to be fought, big obstacles that need to be overcome. What if, for once, we quit magnifying our problems and let the smaller issues remain small?
What if we kill the drama and just get on with ‘regular usual life’?
It’s probably a bit boring, isn’t it? If we don’t have the heart-wrenching tragedies and overwhelming grand triumphs, we just won’t get that high. Life is the one movie where we get to be the hero and the drama keeps the movie interesting. The problem is that it also kills mental peace. In our attempt to make life a blockbuster, we end up busting our own overwrought minds. We obsess over everything – analyze, rationalize and correlate till a theatrical production has been created. Our poor production house of a head which is already half dead from creating the ‘crisis’ then has to go into producing another grand blockbuster around ‘surviving the crisis’. By the time we are tweeting our great survival story, our poor brain is attending its own funeral. What if for once we avoided the mental suicide? What if something went wrong but we told the drama queen inside us to just take a rest. No exaggeration on what has happened, no assumptions on the reasons why it has happened, no blanket judgment on who is responsible for it, no pleas to the Almighty on why the Universe is singling us out to inflict pain. The universe doesn’t know, the universe doesn’t care, the universe has its own problems to deal with (Unless we want to handle those planet-swallowing black holes while the universe thinks about our break up). So if a friend has stopped talking to us completely, why don’t we just call and ask what’s wrong instead of lamenting to all the common friends and analyzing it till we reach the conclusion that this happened because we are the most misunderstood person on Earth. (Emotional tweet to follow – Never explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you. #Iwillsurvive). For all we know, the friend is probably peeved because we don’t have time to call, but have the time to post at least 10 soul searching survival quotes a day. Our minds would be a lot more free and peaceful if we didn’t turn everything into a melting saga. So this is my suggestion, let us fight the battles we really need to fight. At other times, let’s tell the drama queen to shut up and just enjoy being a simple, straightforward potato! Featured photo credit: pixhome.blogspot.com via pixhome.blogspot.in
