I read a story on my newsfeed today that both bothered me and convicted me at the same time.

It was a story featured in Inc Magazine about how Starbucks app users reacted when the app had a glitch and went down for a spell. I don’t go to Starbucks all that often — we have a Peet’s Coffee nearby, but the Starbucks is all the way on the other side of town. So I do have the Peet’s app, but I mostly just use it to track my purchases so I can get a free cup of joe every now and then. But advanced app users — like the ones in this article — use their Starbucks app to pre-order their drinks so they can “grab and go” and get on with the business of caffeinating their lives, I guess.

Anyway. The article highlighted some of the tweets Starbucks app users sent out into the “Twitterverse” to express the hardship experiences they had when the app didn’t work one morning. The tweets were pretty sad — to the author of the article, and to me. And they were overly dramatic — such as calling the experience of having to go into the store to order at the counter “HIDEOUS,” and calling the act of standing in line something only a “peasant” should have to do.

Cue eye roll…

Just like the author of the article, I hope these comments were tongue and cheek tweets. But at the very least, to me anyway, they are just another example of the vapid commentary people put out into the world that pollutes the “mind waves” with self-involved chatter. Even with my desire to always lead with empathy for the perspectives of others, it’s not easy to find a reason to empathize with people when they are so incredibly entitled and self-involved! It’s kind of disgusting to see these utterly useless tweets about going into a store to purchase your coffee from a real person! And honestly? These tweets really make me wonder about the people who post them.

But then it hit me.

I’m no better than any of these people — in my own heart, at least. I might not tweet my selfish thoughts, but I still have them. I still have a very contained bandwidth of tolerance for inconveniences and things that don’t go as planned. And, I still catch myself striving so hard to keep my own agenda for my day on track that I get impatient and testy if one little thing gets in my way or slows me down.

I can get in a mood. And, I can be overly dramatic about my silly problems, too.

I’m in this season of my life where I’m very willing to at least try to look at myself and learn something new from the experiences in my daily grind. I don’t know how long this intense self-inspection will last, but I’m fully in it right now, so that’s why I’m writing about this, I suppose. So whenever I read an article like this one, and it triggers a knee-jerk reaction to judge others, there is this little switch in me that immediately questions if maybe I’m not so innocent or righteous either. And when that switch gets flipped, the answer is almost always the same: 

I’m not all that different or better than anyone else. I’m probably just trying harder right now.

If you’ve been following my posts, then you know that for the past five days, I’ve been incredibly “inconvenienced” by how this pinched nerve in my neck has slowed me down. It’s dominated my life — literally — and caused me to make decisions and choices for myself that were very discouraging. Even cleaning things has been uncomfortably difficult for me because I can’t fully use my left arm, so even doing laundry hasn’t offered me the usual dose of happiness it typically does.

But you should know this: My pinched nerve brought out the worst version of me last night, and I turned into an incredibly ugly person in the middle of the night. You see, it takes me forever to get comfortable in bed because of the radiating pain in my left arm, and the numbness in my pointer finger — while it has improved — is incredibly irritating to me. I can’t tell if my finger is cold or hot…and it buzzes all the time, like a stiff florescent light tube attached to the end of my hand. 

Around 3:30 a.m., I just couldn’t take it anymore! I had flipped, flopped, tossed and turned, and there was simply no escaping that annoying throbbing feeling. So I stumbled out of bed, and I went into the bathroom, and I whisper-shouted the f-word over and over again until some tears started to fill my eyes. I felt myself going into this overly dramatic space in my head where phrases like, “Why me?” were rolling around in my brain as if this was the most devastating thing to ever happen to a girl like me.

Oddly, the f-bomb whisper sesh helped a little. Or maybe it was the tears? Or, perhaps being upright, versus horizontal? Whatever it was, a shift occurred, and when I went back to bed, I actually found a position that gave me a reprieve, and I fell asleep for a couple of hours. But then while I was having my second cup of coffee this morning, I read that Starbucks article, and I got all haughty in my mind about the spoiled people who couldn’t handle a coffee app going down…

Erg.

I’m not saying that the pain of my pinched nerve is something I’m not allowed to react to — nor is the inconvenience of a malfunctioning app people count on every day something to totally dismiss. And I really do understand how easy it is for me to get caught up in my own inner narratives about my life, my goals, my feelings, and my desires — so I can assure that there is some grace in my heart for others caught up in the same inner workings of their own minds, too.

But I guess the thing is, I feel disappointed by how easily I can get consumed with my problems.

I know I’ve already written some version of this in some other post on this blog before, but I think it’s worth stating again. I don’t believe we should be comparing our problems to the problems of others to define who gets to feel bad, and who is just acting spoiled. Whatever a person is going through is real to him or her — and that’s valid. And I don’t think it’s useful for me to shame myself or others for having access to a lot of conveniences and basics in life when other people in the world go without.

But I do believe my greatest antidote to “overly dramatic problem isolation” is to allow my inner hissy fit to unfold, and once it’s run its course, focus on some “overly dramatic thankfulness” to balance out the noise in my head and in the world. This contained and personalized exercise of taking something in my own life and processing it a bit before I go socially dramatic about it seems like a good choice for me — and, perhaps it could work for others, too…

So at some point today, I’m going to tweet something on my Twitter account @ZantSonja. I’m not sure what it will be just yet… But my goal is to make it socially dramatic, yet thankful. And…maybe one of the two people who follow me on Twitter will read my tweet and roll their eyes at me!!

Because that’s just how the circle of socially dramatic communication is completed… Right?