Boo hoo / poor you
A Dawson Crying post.
You post your holiday photos to the group chat before breakfast, and the only reply is a thumbs up from someone who was in the photos. You sit with your coffee and feel it properly. The big night out was supposed to be the whole gang. Then one moved to Sydney, one moved to Dubai, and the rest have a baby, a mortgage and a 9 o'clock bedtime. You are standing in a pub that used to be loud. You are halfway through a packet of crisps when the telly goes quiet and the dialogue gets mumbled. You turn it up, the crunching drowns it out, and you turn it up again. The neighbours now know the plot. You forget to take a picture of the lovely meal until you are on the last forkful. You consider reconstructing it with the empty plate, then accept that some evenings simply never happened. **Why it caught on:** the picture is a still of the actor James Van Der Beek as Dawson Leery, crying in the teen drama *Dawson's Creek*, which first aired in 1998. The tearful, scrunched-up face was captioned with small, self-pitying complaints, and it spread because everyone has felt wounded over something that, said out loud, sounds ridiculous.