What We Call Overreacting
A reaction rarely belongs only to its immediate cause.
The tears over a small thing are almost never about the small thing. They're the small thing plus every unaddressed version of it that came before, arriving all at once because this was the one that finally exceeded capacity. Calling it an overreaction misses the math. It wasn't disproportionate to the moment — it was exactly proportionate to the total, which nobody watching had access to. Only the person crying was doing the full accounting.