CATEGORY: Little Pieces of Life

I used to be a drama queen.

And not just any drama queen. Crowned. Devoted. Faithful to the role and to all the duties befitting a classic queen of drama. And every self-respecting queen needs a kingdom. I had managed to create my own.

Because drama needs an audience. And I had mine. People who listened to me, got involved, worried with me, agreed with me, comforted me, took my side. And the more they responded, the more convinced I became that something very important was indeed happening.

My loyal subjects were there.

And I, as the ruler of this little kingdom, received something I was unable to recognize at the time: validation.

December 12, 2012

On December 12, 2012, I carefully polished my crown and set off to visit another kingdom. I had no reason to suspect that this particular visit would pose any threat to my monarchy. After all, I was going there as a proper queen. With my crown, all the prestige of my royal status, and every privilege I had earned through years of faithful service to the throne of drama.

I knew my own kingdom well.

My subjects were good and loyal and, to be fair, I took equally good care of them. I regularly supplied them with new stories, plot twists, disappointments, injustices, and emotional adventures. Our kingdom was never in any danger of boredom.

So, that afternoon, at the suggestion of a friend, I set off to attend a seminar on self-awareness and personal growth. I didn’t know exactly what I would find there, and I wasn’t particularly concerned. My crown was firmly in place, the drama queen was comfortably seated on her throne, and the monarchy seemed perfectly secure.

Or so I thought.

From the very first moment, I felt like a fish out of water. I listened to people talking about responsibility, about choices, about the way we interpret what happens to us, about our ability to observe our thoughts and reactions.

And all I could think was:

“Wait a minute. What exactly are you telling me? That my crown is useless?”

“And if I take it off, who will I be?”

Because when you have spent years living through a particular pattern of reacting to life, it doesn’t seem excessive to you. It seems normal. Familiar. It is the self you know.

A problem was never simply a problem. It had a past, a present, and an ominous future. A disappointment could, within minutes, become connected to ten other disappointments from my life.

Back then, I didn’t say, “I’m being dramatic.”

I said, “That’s how I feel.”

I didn’t say, “I’m blowing what happened out of proportion.”

I said, “But this is serious.”

I didn’t say, “I’ve already come up with seventeen possible scenarios.”

I said, “I know… something isn’t right.”

The drama queen within me wasn’t simply a way of behaving. She was an entire mechanism through which I perceived the world. Of course, I wasn’t consciously thinking, “Now I’ll make this a little more dramatic so I can get some attention.” Things don’t work that consciously, nor are they quite that simple.

I genuinely suffered.

I genuinely got angry.

I genuinely felt disappointed.

I genuinely believed that whatever was happening was as big as it felt to me. I had simply learned to experience the events of my life through a magnifying glass. And, of course, all of it had to be discussed. Analyzed. Analyzed again. And, if necessary, the previous analysis had to be analyzed too.

I had people I knew would pick up the phone. I knew who would understand me, who would get angry with me, who would tell me, “You’re right,” and who would reassure me that, yes, what had happened really was unacceptable.

And every “You’re right” was like giving my crown a little extra polish.

I couldn’t see it that way back then. Back then, I called it sharing, friendship, support, the need to talk.

That evening, after the first seminar, I returned to my kingdom feeling unsettled. Something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was, so I decided not to pay too much attention to it. As I did every night, I took off my crown, carefully placed it in its display case, and lay down, reflecting on the day that had just passed.

The next morning, naturally, the crown went straight back where it belonged.

I attended the next seminar as a queen. And the one after that. Always with the dignity befitting my status and my crown firmly in place.

Except that, without realizing it yet, something had already begun to change.

Not in my kingdom.

In the queen.

My weekly journeys to that strange kingdom continued until May 2018. Almost six years. Six years during which many different paths of growth gradually began to unfold before me.

First came the path of self-observation. Little by little, I began to look a little more at myself and a little less at everyone else. To observe not only what was happening to me, but also what I was doing with what was happening to me. And for a queen who had grown accustomed to searching for causes beyond the walls of her own kingdom, this was no easy task.

Then I came upon the path of responsibility. There, I had to discover that other people were not always responsible for how I felt, and that between an event and my reaction to it, there was a space I had never noticed before. A space in which I could choose how I would respond to whatever was happening.

Along the way, I also encountered my expectations. All those “shoulds” I had so generously handed out to the people around me, without, of course, ever informing them of my royal decrees. How they should behave, what they should understand, what they should give me and, above all, how they should make me feel.

Somewhere along the way came the difficult path of acceptance. Learning to see people as they truly were rather than as I wanted them to be. Understanding that I could not change them simply to make them fit the story I had written for them. And with acceptance came boundaries: discovering where other people ended and where I began.

I walked some of these paths willingly. I resisted others. On some, I lost my way, turned back, and had to walk them all over again. Because self-awareness, as I discovered along the way, was not a straight road you travel once and eventually arrive somewhere. It was much more like a journey back to myself.

And the crown?

At first, it came with me to every seminar. Then it began to feel heavy. Sometimes I would take it off for a while and, whenever things became difficult, hurriedly put it back on. It was familiar, after all. It had served me faithfully for years.

Until one day, without any grand ceremony and without even realizing exactly when it had happened, I began spending more and more time without it.

The queen had not gone anywhere.

But she had begun to wonder whether she really needed a crown to know who she was.

The drama queen still lives in the palace. Only now, she lives there as a dethroned queen.

I didn’t banish her. I didn’t lock her away in some dark dungeon, and I’m not angry with her. She simply no longer has the power she once had. For many years, she did what she knew how to do best. In her own peculiar way, perhaps she believed she was protecting me. That the more noise she made, the bigger she made things seem, the more likely I was to be heard, cared for, and understood.

Now she issues no decrees. She no longer decides who is guilty and who is innocent. She doesn’t summon her subjects to confirm her judgments. And most importantly, she no longer rules my life.

She spends most of her time in her private chambers, somewhere deep within the palace. She has kept her crown, of course. She sits there polishing it meticulously, just as she always did. I even suspect she is still waiting for the perfect opportunity to make her grand return.

Sometimes I hear her walking through the palace corridors, ready to remind me how much better she was at handling a crisis. Every now and then, she even manages to persuade me to let her sit beside me for a while.

But now I recognize her.

I can listen to her without obeying her. I can understand what she is afraid of without making her fear my own. I can accept her presence without handing her the keys to the kingdom again.

Her crown still shines.

But I have learned to shine without it.