In a society where it’s cool to not care, not try, and go with a flow, passion is often written off as dramatic. I myself have been told that I am dramatic, more than once. For most of my life this really bothered and insulted me, but knowing that I wasn’t going to change anytime soon, I learned to wear the title with pride. Embracing this wasn’t much of an issue, in fact, my yearbook quote was “It’s fine I’m just being dramatic, it’s what I do,” (Lorelai Gilmore) if that tells you anything.
Although it wasn’t until recently I started to really question why for all these years I have been coined “dramatic” and why it always kind of stung. Dramatic is what people call you when they think you care too much. Dramatic is what people call you when your desire for something blurs all other factors. Then it hit me, I care. Yes, I’m lazy and stubborn, and a lot of the time, I just want to sleep, but I care. When I believe in something, I believe it with everything in my body. When I want something, it is all I can think about. When I am excited about something I want to scream it from the rooftops. YES, I am dramatic, but why have I been made to feel less than because of it? The definition of passion is “a strong, barely controllable emotion,” a characteristic that I often feel is replaced with a more degrading word “dramatic.” To be passionate about something is to have an intense enthusiasm. As the great Roald Dahl once said, “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full-speed, embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it, and above all, become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.” If being passionate, and caring, makes me “dramatic” then throw me a sequin vest and send me to Broadway because that’s all I want to ever be. After all isn’t “dramatic” a word that the patriarchy has used to describe women along with words like “hormonal”, “sensitive”, or “high- maintenance.” This might be a stretch, but maybe being “dramatic” is a form of resistance. So today and every day, I’m saying yes to dramatic because I’m saying yes to passion.
