Crying

I have been crying a lot lately. Tears are always at the surface. Sometimes I cannot wait to shut the door of my car or my apartment and let what has been building up spill out. Sometimes I cry for a minute or two and sometimes I fall into a heap and cry for more. Sometimes it feels freeing and sometimes it feels like breaking. But it always feels like it's leading me somewhere. Like the tears are branches of a river drawn down my face. Each branch represents something different. Some branches aren’t even sad, some haven’t even happened yet but they are fears of what will happen, some are of loss, or regret, or anger, or misunderstanding or hurt and they are often of rejection. But they are always leading me. 

I never used to cry. I thought the only appropriate emotion was happiness. That was the only one that made everyone comfortable. And as I sit writing this in a rocking chair with a lumbar pillow and blanket over me with a cup of tea on the table beside me, I understand that comfort has always been a priority to me. Not just my own but other’s comfort. Their comfort makes me more comfortable. And crying generally does not make other people comfortable which in turn means it does not make me comfortable. 

When I tell people that I cry often, the response I get is that they want me to stop.

I do not even cry in front of them.

They do not see me cry, do not hear it, and only know it because I tell them and still, it makes them uncomfortable.

I like that I am crying. It shows me I am growing. It shows me I am changing. I have always had a heart that carries the burden of not only my own hurt but other’s and yet, I would often prevent myself from feeling it because that would be…uncomfortable. For me. And for everyone else. I had a therapist tell me once a long time ago that I would make a good therapist except that I would not be able to compartmentalize other people’s problems from my own and that that would weigh on me over time. SO even though I didn’t particularly want to be a therapist, I crossed that profession off of my list and became a childcare director instead working with 35 women and 100 children between the ages of 6 weeks and 12 years with all of the emotions that goes with that. My job allows me to be a therapist of sorts when the need arises. I have unknowingly and not on purpose been a part of a 20 year long study of emotion. And here is what I have learned about emotions. Kids go through about 102,480,309 emotions a day. They feel them…FEEEEEEL them fully…and then they let them go. They do what therapists have been trying to teach us adults to do for a long time: Feel the emotion, acknowledge it, don’t judge it, and let it pass. Children do this intrinsically. No one teaches them this. As they experience a new emotion, their default is to experience it fully. They do not know another way than fullness of emotion.

We, the adults, are the ones trying to stop the emotions. We do not want to see them, or hear them, be unhappy, mad, fearful, etc. We do not want them to experience hurt or anger or sadness so we ask them to do what we do. Repress it. Put it on the shelf. We mean well, I know we mean well. Our hearts break as our kids' hearts break. We hope to shield little ones from the scary emotions we don’t allow ourselves to fully feel. AND YET…we are just grown ups who cannot feel an emotion fully and move through it without judgement. 

Adults have the same emotions as kids but we tell adults to leave it at the door, to not let anyone see you sweat or cry or be angry. We preach emotional intelligence and being gentle with yourself while you go through grief or loss or betrayal but what we mean is, go through that stuff behind closed doors, after business hours, and not in front of your kids, and not at dinner in public, and be careful to not feel too much less you get stuck there. 

When my friends hear that I cry a lot, alone in my own apartment, they are scared for me. They are scared it is a downhill spiral to a place I used to be. 

The friend who hates my crying the most, who is always checking on me when I am home alone to make sure I am okay, is the same friend who saw my light slowly dim and then go out 20 years ago. She’s the same friend who when I was in my darkest and wanted to die, came to my parents house and painted in big bold letters on my mirror “you are enough”. To be loved by her is the most special gift. Her friendship is pure and will last forever, mainly because of her. And she never wants to see me like I was. So when I see that look in her eye of worry, I love her a little more. I wish she knew that these tears are progress, that I pat myself on the back for crying. That I know I am being broken to be brought back stronger. That I am excited for who I am becoming. That maybe, just maybe, I will be someone who expresses their feelings more freely and moves through them without judgment, the way I should have always been doing, the way my body already knows how to do but the way my mind has told me not to for so many years. I hope I cry easily for the rest of my life. I hope I start to do it around others. I hope I let others' heartbreak shatter me too. I hope I cry at babies being born and dog videos and when someone finally breaks free of their chains. And I hope I let myself cry when people I love are sick or dying and that I won’t patch that emotion to make myself or others more comfortable because what people really need, what the world really needs, is people who care and if I can look at someone the way my friend looks at me when she knows I have been crying and they can see the love she looks at me with, then I think that’s a pretty damn good thing.