Avoid Dramatic People

What a liberating feeling! I've learned to avoid dramatic people! I used to fall pray to their painful whimsy because I used to be dramatic myself. And this is really the key to getting past these people: recognizing and acknowledging your own drama.

Without a nice soft spot to sink their drama hook into, dramatic people have no hope of reeling you into their made-for-TV movies. Don't judge them and don't judge yourself, just recognize and acknowledge on both counts. And don't try to help them. The more you engage, the more you get sucked in.

The only way to help them is to avoid them altogether, leaving them to occupy a world of their own making, full of drama and other dramatic people. If this is not a formula for sufficient suffering that stands a chance of breaking them free of the self-inflicted burden they carry, I don't know what is. Perhaps by being forced to go ever deeper into their drama in this way they will emerge free on the other side of it.

One thing I've learned: Life plays chicken with you until you learn not to flinch. Drama is the bad habit of flinching at everything that life brings your way. And Life won't stop bringing these "opportunities" your way until you learn not to react to them, that is to say dramatize them.

And this is one of the many ways that we can understand that the Universe is truly a beneficent place. It will never give up on all of us drama queens.

You might also like: Dramaholic

Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 10

Start at the beginning: Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 1

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowledge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed, — "How can a man be concealed! How can a man be concealed!"

On the other hand, the hero fears not, that, if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace, and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.

A New Review for The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder on Amazon

Shopper writes:

From the first page of The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder I was hooked. I took the book on vacation to have something to read while I was gone but I couldn't put it down and finished it before reaching Greensboro, NC. Mr. Wright takes the theories behind self help books and brings them all together to develop an excellent murder mystery. I enjoyed the evolvement of the characters, how the detectives develop a tie between the individual books and the murder. Wright's knowledge of the self help books he uses as a basis for the novel is extremely detailed and intriguing. I find myself compelled to pick up a self help book. A must ready for anyone who has doubt of how to live in the here and now or if you just want to enjoy a good book.

Thanks, Shopper!