Your journal prompts this week:
How often do I cry, and how do I feel afterward (mentally, emotionally, and physically)?
In what circumstances or situations do I hold back or suppress my tears, and why?
How does it make me feel when others around me cry?
How can I better support myself and others when a good cry is needed?
I found an old letter from childhood that I'd written to my best friend but for whatever reason, I didn't send. I had just moved after the third grade and was going to a new school, and in the letter, I said to my best friend about moving, "Well at least here I won't be known as the girl who cries all the time."
I was most definitely a sensitive child. When I felt hurt or scared (which was a lot of the time), I cried.
I'll be honest, there was a good portion of my life that crying too often or too publicly was a "problem." It was a problem in the sense that it made everyone around me really uncomfortable whenever I did it.
Even now with a baby, I am on edge whenever she cries. I think often, "Please don't cry." And I tell her, "It's okay, everything's fine." It's so automatic, and after I say it, I cringe a little, remember my own mom telling me as kid to "stop crying."
From a young age, I was taught that tears got me into trouble and crying was bad. I found it was often interpreted by others as defiance or weakness.
When I couldn't answer a mental math question in the sixth grade, I cried at my desk, and the teacher sent me into the hallway and yelled at me. He told my mom he thought I was mumbling swear words at him under my breath. Nope, just crying about how stupid I felt.
After failing my driver's test with the mean driving instructor/gym teacher in high school, I cried in the backseat all the way back to school. She asked me why I was crying, and I said it was because I didn't usually fail things. She called my mom and told her I "gave her sass." Nope, just humiliated and sad.
Then there was my entire experience working in TV News, which made me cry often. After a difficult morning of the Executive Producer yelling at me for whatever irked her that day, I sat up in the booth producing the show, tears streaming from my eyes. They pulled me out of the room and wouldn't let me keep producing the show. I was later asked to have a doctor sign a form saying that I had a disability (anxiety) that kept me from doing my job, and I needed to be transferred to a smaller market station where I might perform better, with less pressure. My doctor refused to sign it. "You are doing your job. They just don't like how you're doing it," she said.
I always found it interesting though that people could scream and yell to their heart's content in a newsroom—and really in many workplaces. This was accepted just as a part of their personalities. But crying? That was a problem that indicated you weren't capable of handling or doing your job. Things might be different in today's workplace, but back then, this is how it was.
So why is anger generally more accepted than sadness?
The only thing I can think of is that the discomfort of watching someone cry is more than most people can handle, and they have no idea what to do in response. They were also taught it was a signal of weakness, and seeing someone in a weak moment makes anyone want to look away. But if someone yells, they yell back or yell at them to calm down. It's not seen as a weakness, but an aggression that provokes action and response.
This might also play a role in why people default into aggressively demanding a person stop crying. But that usually just makes them cry more (at least in my experience).
Even after all these years, none of this has stopped me from crying. At my core, I'm just a crier, but as I've gotten older, I've learned to hide it from most people.
I've felt bad about my crying and my anxiety for years, believing that I'm a problem, a burden to others they'd rather not deal with. I needed to keep my tears to myself.
It wasn't until I saw an interesting Instagram post from The Holistic Psychologist that I started thinking it was time to accept this part of myself, and to stop viewing it as a problem to be solved or fixed:
I've spent a lot of time learning about how to get back into the parasympathetic state, mostly through yoga. But for whatever reason, I never connected the dots that crying is also an important release. No one ever asked me before if I felt better after crying, the focus was always just on getting me to stop. But the reality is yes, I feel better. It is simply my way of letting that bottled up anxiety flow right out of me, and that's okay.
I think we would all do better if we learned to accept crying as a natural release, with no other meaning or judgment behind it—whether it is others crying or ourselves. It doesn't need to be stopped or fixed. It's an emotion, not a problem.
So stop holding back your tears. Let 'em flow. Let them bring you back home to yourself. And don't apologize for them.
Everyone else can just learn to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Have you ever been told to stop crying, or have you ever made other people uncomfortable when you needed to let the tears flow? Feel free to share your thoughts or insights below in the comments. And as always, if you want me to pull an Oracle or Tarot card for you this week for some guidance, you can also let me know in the comments below.
With much love and gratitude,
Marcy
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