Public apology: I use bold for emphasis in this article. EMPHASIS!

Have you ever thought, "Why is there so much drama? This isn't high school!"? Well, I have. I've been thinking that for years; before college, before high school, heck, even in middle school I thought there was too much drama in everyone's lives. I can see your face now: you're waiting until you graduate college and can finally get a big boy/girl job and get away from all the late nights listening to everyone talk about what boys or girls they like, who hates who, and all the dirt I KNOW you feed off of (It's okay, I LIVE for drama too.) Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you. "High school drama" isn't a thing, it's life. Not like "Taco Bell is life" or "'Parks and Rec' is life" (even though those are two of my favorite past times.) "High school drama" exists in every walk of life, and it's an inescapable anomaly you just need to live with.

You might be asking, "How do you know? Maybe you're just a dramatic person." And you're right; I am a dramatic person, but I don't like to start drama, I just love to hear gossip. I'm a nosy person, I admit it, but I'll tell you how I know that drama is everywhere.

I work in a steel mill: a dark, hot place that presses 2,000-degree slabs of metal and wrap it up into a beautiful coil package. The people I work with are all gritty, middle-aged men with beards who put their lives and their beards at risk every day, and even in this dark, burning abyss, there is just as much drama as a middle school dance. You would not BELIEVE the petty nonsense I'm contractually obligated to deal with on a daily basis. An electrician and a mechanic have differing points of view on a solution to a problem with a piece of machinery? Currently hearing my coworker yelling about it in anger. There's a rumor spreading around that a manager is out to get a machine operator? You'd better believe that I've heard it at least a dozen times from at least two dozen people. The point I'm trying to make is that if there is an insatiable level of drama between a group comprised solely of bearded, grizzly rednecks, then there is no hope for literally any other combination of coworkers.

Drama isn't a bad thing, it's just a fact of life. It's a give and take relationship you'll hold with your peers which balances social lives between a common denominator. You don't need to spend all your time wishing "high school drama" would just end. Everyone needs to embrace the carefully woven spider web of social information and interaction that's considered drama. Embrace love; embrace life; embrace drama, because they're all basically the same thing.