What They See

There’s always something wrong with Lisa. Always a crisis, always chaos, always tears. She texts in all caps about minor inconveniences. She cries at work. She makes everything about her.

Someone mentions a headache, Lisa has a migraine. Someone’s going through a breakup, Lisa reminds everyone she’s been through three. Her problems are always bigger, always more urgent, always center stage.

Her friends are exhausted. “I can’t deal with another Lisa emergency,” they say. “Everything is the end of the world with her.”

They’ve learned to skim her messages, to half-listen to her venting, to create distance. “She’s too much,” they agree. “She needs to get it together.”

Drama queen. Attention seeker. Exhausting. Manipulative.

They’re not wrong that she’s intense. They’re just wrong about why.

What She’s Surviving

Lisa’s nervous system doesn’t have a dimmer switch. It only knows OFF and EMERGENCY.

She grew up in a house where calm meant danger. Where silence meant someone was about to explode. Where she learned to read microscopic shifts in mood and interpret them as threats. Her father’s drinking. Her mother’s depression. The fights that came from nowhere and destroyed everything.

She became hypervigilant before she knew the word. Every small thing—a delayed text, a change in tone, a canceled plan—triggers the same alarm system that once kept her safe. Her brain can’t tell the difference between “my friend is busy” and “I’m about to be abandoned.”

The crying isn’t manipulation. It’s dysregulation. Her body floods with cortisol over things that shouldn’t be catastrophic because it never learned what catastrophic actually means. Everything felt catastrophic growing up. So everything still does.

The constant crises aren’t invented. They’re genuinely how she experiences the world—amplified, overwhelming, unmanageable. She’s not making it up. She’s drowning in her own nervous system’s overreaction.

“You’re too sensitive,” people tell her. As if sensitivity is a choice. As if she didn’t try for years to feel less, to react less, to be less.

The Internal Dialogue

I know I’m too much.

Lisa knows. She sees people’s eyes glaze over. She notices when they start responding slower to her texts. She feels them pulling away, and it confirms her deepest fear: she is fundamentally unlovable.

I don’t know how to be different.

She’s tried. She’s sat on her panic, swallowed her tears, forced herself to “be normal.” But the feelings don’t disappear—they just build until they explode anyway, usually at worse times, in worse ways.

If I don’t talk about it, I’ll implode.

This is what her friends don’t understand. The venting, the processing, the constant analyzing—it’s not attention-seeking. It’s pressure release. It’s the only way she knows to stop the thoughts from eating her alive.

Everyone leaves eventually.

This is the belief that drives everything. If she’s too much, they’ll leave. If she’s not enough, they’ll leave. So she oscillates between oversharing and withdrawing, between clinging and pushing away, never finding the middle ground where love is safe.

The Moment

Lisa’s best friend finally snaps. “I can’t be your therapist anymore. I have my own problems.”

Lisa goes silent. Not because she’s hurt—though she is—but because she suddenly sees herself through her friend’s eyes. The constant need. The endless crises. The emotional labor she’s been demanding without realizing it.

She starts therapy. Real therapy, not just friends as unpaid counselors.

Her therapist teaches her about nervous system regulation, about the difference between feeling and fact, about how childhood trauma rewires your threat detection. For the first time, someone explains that she’s not broken—she’s injured. And injuries can heal.

It takes time. She still overreacts sometimes. But now she catches herself. “I’m panicking about this text, but I know that’s my anxiety, not reality.” “I’m feeling abandoned, but I recognize that’s an old wound, not what’s actually happening.”

She starts warning friends: “I’m having a rough day and might spiral. I’m working on it, but I wanted you to know.” The honesty helps. The self-awareness helps.

Slowly, people stop pulling away. Because the drama was never the problem. The lack of awareness was.

The Truth

The drama queen isn’t seeking attention. She’s seeking regulation—desperately trying to get someone else to calm the storm inside her because she never learned how to calm it herself.

We judge emotional intensity without asking where it came from. We call people dramatic without recognizing that their normal meter is broken, calibrated by chaos they didn’t choose.

Sometimes the person who seems like too much is just a person whose nervous system is still stuck in survival mode, still waiting for the threat to pass, still unable to believe that peace is possible.

She doesn’t need judgment. She needs someone to help her learn that not everything is an emergency. That she’s safe now. That feeling everything doesn’t mean she has to express everything.

Who is Lisa? Someone whose feelings are real, even when they’re disproportionate. Someone learning, slowly, that she can hold her own pain without drowning others in it. Someone who isn’t too much—she’s just healing from too much.