In He’s Just Not That Into You, the main character Gigi does everything at the last minute.  One of the other characters calls her on it (and I’m using poetic license here because his actual quote wasn’t that interesting):

“You love drama. You wait until the last minute to do everything to feel the adrenaline rush to see whether you will make the deadline or not.”

That exactly describes me-and a lot of my classmates at Harvard Business School. I now have to admit it:

I. LOVE. DRAMA.

I’ve been called a Drama Queen by men I’ve dated, and my girl friends who share similar dating habits as I do have now concluded that we love drama. My parents have been hounding me about my love for last-minute races to the finish line ever since I was in middle school. However, there is a place for drama-and it’s not in your daily life. Q said something yesterday that made me think:

“A lot of things are going to happen in your life. There will be plenty of drama, and difficult things to deal with. Don’t find or create drama where there isn’t drama.”

Considering I love movies and have wanted to be famous from a very young age, it makes sense that I might try and bring a little bit of Hollywood in to my everyday life. However, I’m realizing now how easily excitable I can be, how much I worry about things (and then dramatize the worst possible scenario in my mind), and how much I relish telling stories-even the really painful, awful ones.  Detailed storytelling is a great strength of mine-and maybe one day I’ll write a fantastic memoir as great as Eat, Pray, Love, but until then I should keep the drama contained to my fiction writing and entertainment viewing, or I’ll just invite strife and heartache into my life.

If you’re wondering whether you might be a Drama King or Drama Queen, consider the following:

• Do you often wait until the last minute to do things-like your taxes, job applications, sending off Mother’s Day cards, etc.?
• In your dating life, do you find yourself having a lot of talks about “the relationship” rather than just experiencing the relationship?
• Do you find that you tell the same story more than twice in a week?
• When bad things happen to you, is one of the first things you think to do is call a friend and tell her/him about it rather than reflect upon it yourself?
• When watching dramatic movies like Closer, do you think, “Oh, God, that’s me-or could be me”?
• Have you been told that you like drama?

If you answered yes to three or more of those questions, you are for sure in love with drama. This is not a bad thing. It just means that you have to channel that drama-prone energy to the right places.

Try:

• Creative Writing: Drama is what makes stories interesting. Instead of creating drama in your life, write stories filled with drama and details. Then submit your stories to contest and win money. I wrote a very dramatic story while in college and won $800 for it. Now, that’s drama that pays off.
• Acting: There are plenty of small theater companies that would love to have you try out for a part. Release some of that drama energy on the stage.
• Mentoring at-risk youth: You’ll be amazed and dismayed at the amount of real-life drama many young people have to deal with everyday. Helping them through their drama will show you what real drama is, and give you an appreciation for your relatively drama-free life. It will also get you thinking more about others rather than focusing on yourself. This year, I volunteered with Citizens Schools here in Boston and it was a very rewarding experience.
• Journaling: If you take the time to write about your thoughts and feelings, and to hash out every dramatic detail of what happened to you in a day, you may find yourself getting tired of thinking about your own drama. Drama King/Queen-type drama is never really that interesting.
• Therapy: Counselors are paid to listen to people’s drama and help them work through it. Most insurance pays for therapy and if you’re a student, you can probably get a number of sessions free through your school. A counselor might be just what you need to release those dramatic tendencies.

These are just a few tips for leading a more drama-free life. I’ve tried all of these things, and have enjoyed them all, but my dramatic tendencies persist. Perhaps that means that the most important way to lead a drama-free life is to change the way you think and react to the situations in which you find yourself not as if you are on a movie screen but as if there are real people with real feelings and consequences involved.

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