Too Precious

 

There's a certain type of person I meet in the arts all the time.

The Precious People.

You usually don't notice how precious they are at first. Most of the time, you need to get a good dose of their social media first, and then it becomes more apparent.

They use many of the same expressions, and cultivate the same kind of brand.

Two months ago, I was cast in a digital reading and when I friended all of the other actors, I noticed that red flag in one of their tweets.

They posted about some sad news story (one that was pretty questionable, meme driven, no link to objective proof) with the caption--

This makes my heart hurt.

Ruh-roh, I thought.

For years, I didn't have any way to define this kind of person other than by saying they're "precious." I did not grow up with many precious people. I grew up still hearing the word "tough" as a compliment. No apologies about it. No quantifying it. You wanted to be tough.

As I grew older, using words like "tough" to compliment people became...complicated, and I get that. Believe me. That, combined with an entire generation of young men and women learning to speak from watching "Buffy," deciding they could never be Buffy, and choosing to be Willow instead, led to a strange new collective of people my age who seemed to secretly contain a reserve of absolute sociopathy while maintaining a personality so sensitive, it'll bruise at the mere sight of an unkind word.

Is it possible some of these people are authentically tender souls?

Sure.

But over the past few years, I've noticed that one-by-one, people I know who present as precious eventually reveal themselves to be some of the meanest people on earth.

Who among us has not known someone who leaves a room with tears in their eyes if someone dares to raise their voice in something even resembling anger, but will then quietly whisper something sadistic in your ear about what someone wore to a party? The dish it out/take it imbalance seems to based in the unspoken ideology that you can behave as badly as you want privately as long as publicly you maintain a sweet persona that garners you endless sympathy and protection from everyone around you.

These are people who always hint at some tragedy or trauma that's befallen them, without ever coming forward with exactly what it is, despite them being more than willing to stop every conversation dead in its tracks to share a granular detail about their day or something that seems far too personal to share with someone they've must met. It becomes impossible to tell if they've actually experienced any of the buzzwords they're posting about, or if they're just an advocate for those causes. The latter would be totally fine, but it seems important to them that people treat them as an authority, except for the part where we give authorities responsibilities. Every precious person I've known has been notoriously bad when it came to being responsible for anything. It becomes part of the pixie-stick, flower child, open heart persona they've used to endear everyone to them. If you count on them for something, and they let you down, an army of supporters descend on you if you so much as mumble about it.

They're going through a lot right now.

Now, this excuse for just about anything always bothers me, because, especially as of late, we're all going through a lot right now, and if you aren't the sort of precious person who uses your personal setbacks and tragedies to get out of commitments, then you face the double punishment of people thinking it's cool to stand you up and the criticism of their defenders, because the assumption is that they have it worse than you (if that's even a thing) so you should be more understanding.

All the while, you're doing the thing they were supposed to do for you, and so there's more work on your plate and, oh look, the precious person just updated their Instagram twelve times and wrote a poem about their twin beta fish.

In this way, people like that are endlessly infuriating to people like me.

Not because I'm good and they're bad. Quite the opposite.

The cynic in me would tell you that I believe all people are bad and it's just about the level of bad you're dealing with in any individual.

That's why my preference (both in others and myself) is to just own the bad and say "Sometimes you'll catch me being nice, but it's going to be rare. Like spotting a unicorn or a decent pair of jeans at Target."

The people and soon-to-be-ex talk show hosts who say things like "Be kind" and "All the feels" and "This makes my heart smile"  are promising something they're rarely ever prepared to deliver. Because part of being kind means making room for someone else to have a bad day or to require something more than a comment that says "Love you" with a bunch of emojis. They'll be the first ones to tell you that they don't have the energy to be good in a crisis or even be much of a friend, but they have a nuclear reactor inside them that activates when a photo of them running through a meadow needs to be photoshopped until it looks like it was pulled from a lexapro ad.

It's a carefully crafted way of demanding the most from everyone around you while being asked to contribute nothing to any of those relationships. It shows itself in statuses that seem to address other statuses that don't really exist. "People have been asking me--"

Let me ask you this, Reader, have you ever asked anybody about anything that led to them addressing whatever it was you were asking in a status?

Yeah, me neither.

Part of the Precious Persona is a bi-monthly posting all about how they need to worry about themselves for a change, causing anyone who knows them to wonder if there are other people they're doing things for, since it doesn't seem like they're doing anything for you. Occasionally they'll perpetuate that notion by posting things like "Could really use some good vibes today."

(By the way, Facebook owns sixty percent of all vibes you transfer through their platform.)

It's an ongoing cycle of letting people think you're dealing with a series of travesties and holding up as best you can, and while, again, that may be true for some people, anytime most of these people face an actual obstacle, they seem all too willing to talk about it, most of the time in great detail.

We've covered for people like this, and, in some ways, it's good that we did. We shouldn't make people talk about their personal lives if they're uncomfortable doing so, and yes, that meme is sort of right, in that, many people are struggling with things they don't talk about, but we've also created another breed of nightmare by laying out a blueprint for how to get lots of attention and affection in a way that the pandemic has shown will ultimately bear out to be quite gross.

You probably noticed this over a year ago, when the entire world suddenly--and clearly--had a lot going on. As we all began dealing with a worldwide crisis, I noticed some of the precious people in my life having a particularly hard time with it. At first, it seemed understandable. But then, it morphed into something more distasteful. The best way I can describe it is that I once knew an actress who was the nicest person you ever met while she was working on a show, and when she wasn't, she immediately turned into Mothra. Not having the constant stream of attention that theater gives you would transform her almost instantly into a focus-stealing mad-grabber. Once, after not getting a lead part in a play a friend of ours was directing, she vaguely hinted at being kidnapped on Twitter for a few days, then faked a boyfriend, a fight, a break-up, a reunion, and a job at CBS. Anything that would get us engaging with her. And all the while, because she had always presented as nice, no matter how out of control she seemed, she had an inner circle of sincerely lovely people around her insisting that someone who once took a photo of herself holding a baby could never make up a story about being the newest lead on NCIS: Toronto.

While all our personal issues are not meant to be compared, we are on the way out of a worldwide crisis that has absolutely devastated people in ways that I cannot even conceive of, and we also have people who have really missed having people pay attention to them, and those two things are not the same. If we make it a habit of pouring our time and energy down the Black Hole that is the psyche of any precious person in our lives simply because we're not good at telling the difference between them and the people who really do need whatever little we can afford to give, then I'm worried we'll start to lose even more people than we're losing now.

We have to get better at hearing a cry for help over all that precious noise.