For crying out loud: Why it's actually good to shed tears
My whole life I have been called sensitive. It was said with a sneer, or a gentle, sympathetic shoulder squeeze, perhaps an affectionate elbowing. In arguments with sisters, and then later boyfriends, I would always cry.Â
I was derided for this: I was trying to be manipulative, to win the quarrel by default, to illicit sympathy with this overzealous demonstration of helplessness.
The assumption of my opponent was that my crying was a signifier of weakness, of inexcusable fragility. This drew as much scorn as it did pity and, later, when the realisation hit that my wails would lead to retribution in the form of parental involvement or, in the case of boyfriends, an even LONGER talk about feelings and emotions, fear.Â
Thus, I learned early on, despite the protestations of a loving mother that my capacity to feel was my own, unique superpower, that crying wasn’t just a source of annoyance for others: it was an obstacle hindering my ability to get by in the world.
Perhaps from birth, we are taught that crying is a symbol of something being “wrong”: a baby’s tears mean that it is hungry, sick, in pain. Tears are an internationally-recognised red flag for a problem that needs to be “fixed” and, if no specific problem can be identified or an adequate solution sourced, then it is not the tears we consider wrong but the person from which they are leaking.
As I grew up, so grew my knowledge of the world – its complexities, cruelties, callousness. I cried more frequently, unable to process or digest it all: the homelessness and wars, famines and genocides. Soon, the promises and platitudes that had once quietened me – the appeals for faith in humanity, a belief in all-mighty justice – no longer soothed but enraged me, as I found them to be as empty as the dry heave that would grip me after an ugly cry. As my tears unearthed neither a compact problem nor ready-made solution, I became the issue under scrutiny.
I began to see the bewilderment and fear in others’ eyes as they realised this wild emotion in me was untameable; that this propensity to sob or howl or weep terrified them because it couldn’t be assuaged, it couldn’t be placated with cooings of brighter days or ragged clichés about all being fair in love and war. It couldn’t be distracted or dissuaded from its righteousness nor swayed into submission. It became apparent to me, in these looks of alarm or accusations of hysteria, that I was the thing that was wrong.
In Untamed, Glennon Doyle describes humanity as living in our own, individual snow globes.
The metaphor is that we have each created a world of interior chaos that we shake up to distract ourselves and others from the dragon that rests within. We have encased ourselves in a fortress of swirling subterfuge that keeps us too agitated, too flurrying and scattered to see the bare essence of ourselves. The dragon, she says, is our fierce and unrelenting truth, our most authentic self in all its flamed imperfection and scaly intensity.
My dragon was – is – my softness. A permeability to the world and the words of others, a heart worn too earnestly on its sleeve, a free-flow of waterworks. When I revealed my dragon to the world, it was mostly met with incomprehension – scornful, concerned, or otherwise – and so I believed not only my tears but the sensitivity they represented to be inherently wrong. I became ashamed. I began to shake my snow globe more, to mask, disguise, and deny the dragon inside.
I achieved this with rigorous scheduling that gave me little time to breathe, committing to my life with more ferocity than ever before, determined to suck every bit of sweetness out of it that I could. I ran to 7am spin classes before work, met friends on my lunch hour, saw more friends in the evening as we went to movies, gigs, pubs, art classes, comedy shows, restaurants. I became a writer in the twilit hours of dawn and dusk, scribbling articles while my bed was still warm from waking, or turned down ready for slumber. Even so called “downtime” was dedicated to some form of self-improvement: laundry, batch cooking, reading, painting, composing, campaigning not solely for the love of these things but for the validation they brought as collectible badges of self-improvement, brooches proclaiming my growing skillset.
I ensured I was never once bored, never once approaching a place of predictability, of sure and well-worn territory in which I might, as Glennon writes, “sink” into myself. I avoided any hint of silence, of stillness.
Crying was rendered redundant, in this snow globe world perpetually swirling with the ebullience of a best life being lived. Emotions became, though I was unaware at the time, a vehicle for progressing my writing career: I commodified the worthy ones into pitches to lambaste editors with. The others were promptly discarded: wastes of energy, time, brain space.
Crying, if it wasn’t constructive or constructing my next article, I deemed – though I would never admit it – useless. An activity that only held value if it led to something: a resolution, a solution, an idea I could twist into something tangible, demonstrable, sellable.
And I loved the running, loved the exhaustion of falling into bed after a day spent deliciously busy, loved the achievement of watching myself exceed and challenge and flit breathlessly in the reflection of others’ eyes.
Then lockdown came (the second, and now third lockdown – the real lockdowns – not that comparatively blissful time in March when we were all drunk on the perfume of banana bread and salivating over Joe Wicks on YouTube). And stillness was all there was.
Suddenly, I was crying again. In a Dunnes Stores aisle as their pandemic-themed ad over the intercom told me they’d “keep the chips frozen”. At the sight of my dog each morning, as I watched her stiff legs quiver and realised I would soon lose her. At insurance ads on TV, most news reports, the leader of a political party that I am morally opposed to simply because the sight of him, showing up to a podium, business-like in a navy-blue suit and sounding self-assured and brisk, made me feel safe, protected, like a schoolchild comforted by the dependable severity of her principal.
I told friends it was the pandemic. I stole the clichés of the media and spun them into a narrative that could explain this sudden illness of weepy lethargy: “we are living through unprecedented times”. The uncertainty, the constant news updates are affecting my mood on a subconscious level – this is situational, not psychological, circumstantial not personal. Everything I said and thought was intended to distance myself from the weakness – find another source for it, a cause outside of myself.
Except, everyone was crying. Friends called and would burst into tears at a cursory salutation, excusing this lapse of decorum with a confused apology. “Sorry,” they stuttered. “I don’t know why I’m getting upset, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, honestly it’s silly – I must be getting my period.” We laughed it off when recovered – self-deprecating and ridiculing ourselves before others could or, worse, before they might worry about us.
We blamed the news, the zeitgeist of fear and paranoia, the isolation, the lack of distractions and interactions, our periods, our lack of periods, our contraception, our failure to take our contraception, too much caffeine, not enough caffeine, lack of sleep, not enough sleep. We all looked at each other wide-eyed, not sure of what was happening to us. This disintegration, this dissolution into watery, insubstantial minefields “over nothing”. I thought giving up dairy would help. My sister said she needed to exercise more. We thought we could “fix” it: this broken fissure in us. I remember the almost maniacal search for an answer to our malaise because coronavirus wasn’t it, exactly. There was something more, but what?
They’re what we’ve spent months, even years, stifling, camouflaging, filtering, in our snow globe prisons. They’re what we’ve been suppressing in our constant shake-ups to become good women, good people, good mothers and friends and employees and lovers.
And now, with the snow globe finally still, the gilded cage rusted to nothing, now I can no longer remember why I NEED to get up at 6.30am to exercise, why I CAN’T have bread for every meal, why I MUST have a reason to watch terrible TV, there’s nowhere to run from the discomfort tears betray, no storm to whip it away. And everything we’ve been bottling – these things we think make us weak and shameful, unattractive and unworthy – are spilling out of us now. Wild and untamed. Incendiary.
For crying out loud, it is beautiful. What I have realised in this pandemic, in this unprecedented return to my blubbering self, is that in today’s world of overwhelming pain and suffering, of irreparable disconnection and discord, you are not crazy for crying all the time – you are crazy for not crying all the time. In those childhood standoffs or adult arguments, I wasn’t the helpless fool I was made to feel, I wasn’t the damsel in distress, manipulating her vulnerability for victory, and I wasn’t the hysterical, crazy, neurotic, attention-seeking madam I was frequently gaslighted to believe I was. I was brave. I was honest. I was open and authentic, vulnerable and real. I was feeling.
That isn’t just brave in a world of shame, it is miraculous.
To remain porous to a world that is cruel. To remain open to both its pleasure and its pain, even when this is beyond sense or self-preservation. Even when you know to be open is to be hurt.
To continue to bear witness, even when you desperately want to look away: to stare down the ugliness as well as gaze upon the beauty. So now, instead of feeling shame when I cry in front of someone who looks at me with derision or fear or mocking, I feel pity. Pity that they are still trapped in the snow globe, too scared of turning towards the dragon within to know what it is to truly feel. To feel it ALL. To feel the bad stuff, not so you can brag about the growth it brings you, but because to feel – as Glennon so beautifully writes – is to be well and truly alive.
This is my wildness. This is my strength. These are my tears. I can cry. You can too.
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