"A Drama Queen!"
That's a pretty high aspiration for a newborn.
Big stages, bright lights, the kind of tantrums The Hollywood Reporter writes about—
Hey, who am I to argue with a mom-and-baby nurse who's met thousands of arrivals?
And I didn't.
But calling our 17-hour-old a Drama Queen was never about her future. It was a verdict on a few cries, from a baby who'd been out of the womb for less than a day.
For the last ten months I've had a different view of the healthcare system. Many providers, many settings, good news along the way. And I'm here to report: it was mostly great—competent people, a few of them exceptional. But some of them had misplaced words that have stuck with me, not because they were cruel but because of the gap, upon reflection, between what they meant and what I felt.
At six weeks, an ultrasound tech pointed at the screen and said, cheerfully, "that little cluster of cells is your baby."
She'd just told us the heart is the first organ to develop. And I said, "ahhhh—I bet that's because love comes first."
She laughed and said she was going to steal it. Good—because "cluster of cells" landed a little cool for a moment that wasn't.
The next instance came at the 20-week anatomy scan when the babe wriggled through the whole thing and wouldn't turn far enough for a clean look at the heart. At the front desk on our way out, the woman scheduling the follow-up scan said, half-smiling, "she was being a little naughty in there, huh?"
Naughty? I felt a flare. You don't know the babe.
The two ultrasound experiences were gentle. This next one was less so.
Second night in the hospital, early in the morning, on next to no sleep in three days—our daughter crying and not stopping, hungry, because the colostrum wasn't keeping up with what she needed. The nurse was reviewing the 24-hour exam, the one where they weigh the baby against birth weight, and she mentioned, almost off-handedly, that if babe kept losing weight they might not let us take her home the next day.
What followed was a small panic and a long night—a consent form, a decision to supplement with donor milk, hand-expressing colostrum into a syringe and feeding it to a day-old who was also just trying to figure it out. At 2am. As brand-new parents. From a sentence interpreting an exam that was intended to be helpful.
These are all examples of the intent and impact gap. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen—three Harvard negotiation researchers, in their book Difficult Conversations—put it plainly: intent lives in your head, impact lands in someone else's. We always know our own intent and almost never anyone else's, so all we really get from people is how their words hit us. And then we derive intent from that impact. The authors call it an "intention invention."
"Drama queen" was not a verdict on a 17-hour-old—it was something someone says to sleep-deprived parents trying to calm a newborn in an effort to relate. The label was wrong, yes, but the nurse wasn't unkind.
The tech who said "cluster of cells" was just trying to find the right words in those early uncertain weeks. The nurse who scared us about her weight was telling us something true. But what landed was this: if she doesn't gain weight, you can't leave.
Often, giving people the benefit of the doubt is a reasonable response to the intent and impact gap—but that's a personal absolution, one you apply to avoid unproductive and unnecessary conflict.
At work, though, you're interacting with the same people over and over. And the benefit of the doubt on repeat becomes a slow descent to resentment.
In those moments: If you keep it to yourself, you're the one deciding what they meant. Saying something is the only way to preempt the guess. If someone's words hurt, tell them—"when you [did the thing], I felt [how you felt]"—and then ask what they meant. What you felt is yours to share. What they meant is theirs. This is much easier when power dynamics are equal, or at least respected; if not, sometimes the move is not to ask at all.
And when someone gives you the gift of telling you, out loud, that you've hurt them, resist defending yourself. Assume they probably didn't mean it, own that you're imperfect with your words too, and get curious about what happened.