AJ the Irish Lass' Ramblings

Photo: Nick Smith / You take the high road

I was thinking the other day about some interesting parallels between some drama that’s played out over a Facebook group I was once in and some unrelated “family drama”. Although these incidents involved two different groups of people, there were some interesting dynamics that both had in common.

The Facebook group was a rescue/lost & found group that a lot of people involved in local rescue treat as THE go-to group for lost/found/rehoming pet issues, despite a lot of similar groups also existing on FB for the area. One day, without any explanation, I found myself not only removed, but also banned from the group. This is not exactly a common occurance for me.

Apparently, a lot of people in the group in question have likewise been banned for no good reason. Speculation seems to range from being a member of other groups that the admin doesn’t like to having the “wrong” person on your friends list. What it boils down to is that the explanations in this case are just that-speculation. I’m sure the same type of drama plays out on other groups on FB all the time.

In the case of the “family drama”, certain people ceased contacting me at all after a family member died, after having been in touch with me all along. After getting tired of having the people in question not even ask how I was doing or acknowledging a few emails/messages where an answer was necessary, I got tired of the whole thing and unfriended them, figuring they wanted nothing to do with me. Ironic how thin-skinned people can get about being unfriended by someone they’re not even talking to!

Personally, I think a lot of people take Facebook friend status entirely too personally. The way some people act about it, you’d think an unfriending was right up there with getting slapped with a restraining order. In reality, a lot of people who have gone through a loss need some time to decompress without worrying about everything they say online being picked to pieces by someone who can’t even take a minute to see how they’re doing. Chances are in most cases that the “unfriended” have probably had a window of opportunity as long as they weren’t blocked.

Honestly, in cases either like the FB group in question or the family drama, there are two possible ways people COULD handle such things:

A. You could go the route of all out war against the offending parties, finding it necessary to “warn” everybody who has contact with them about their behavior (“don’t join this group, they’re idiots”, “so-and-so is a backstabber, no matter how nice they were to you”), and otherwise keeping the attention on what they’ve done.

B. You could take the high road, recognize that you can only control how you handle YOUR interactions (if any) with the people in question, and and realize that otherwise removing yourself from the drama that others created makes YOU the rational, responsible adult.

I’ve chosen Path B, and although not perfect, I’ve found it makes difficult interactions much easier. Drama queens will always be with us, no matter what, but the choice and responsibility for how you cope with everything is ultimately YOURS.