Go Ahead and Exaggerate A Little

Teen Brain

After watching this video the other day I’ve realized something about the readers of this blog and me. For some reason we all love it when I exaggerate (for the most part). I literally do nothing during the day except for going to work, or school and then I go home and hang out with friends. Most of the rest of my time is spent writing all about the mundane things that I do and then posting it on the internet.

I’ve written a post about watching cat videos for Pete’s sake, and people still enjoy coming back to visit my blog. It’s entertaining at times to read all of my posts about nothing, but I worry now that it affects my relationships IRL (in real life) as well. Everything with me is “life or death,” “do this now or the world will end,” and “my situation is the worst situation in the world and I’m going to die right now.” Nothing is ever just moderately normal or just boring with me, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m within that twenty to twenty-five-year-old last bit of brain developing stage or because that’s just me.

I take stories about picking up someone’s lunch at Wendy’s and I turn it into some disastrous catastrophe that ruined my life, or I talk about my experiences with watching training videos at my department store job and I turn it into something that sounds completely ridiculous. A planned trip to Oregon with friends has gotten stretched into an epic tale about life and love, and when I do get around to writing a completely made up story no one seems to respond to it. I suppose it’s something about my exaggerated life that draws people in and keeps them coming back for more.

At times I find myself taking situations that were meant to be nothing and I write about them in a way that I think is funny, but in reality it just ends up upsetting people. Going to the store for a bottle of Snapple becomes an urban war story, and a flat tire becomes a story about a totally dramatized and exaggerated near-death-experience. I really do sometimes think way too much, and that can be okay in some instances, but I’ve just been worrying more now about how the relationships that I have established outside my life online have been affected by me taking everything from a low/moderate level of intensity and transforming it all the way to a code red.

Like I said, it’s entertaining at times, but I rather not have my online literary life bleed into the real world, and that’s a pretty tricky line not to cross.