A list of times I’ve cried lately:
1. When Britney Spears announced she no longer believed in god on Instagram.
2. When watching Lizzo’s performance on my computer.
3. When watching Pamela Anderson’s documentary on my iPad.
4. When I tried to sell patches on my Instagram stories.
5. On the night of my birthday.
6. Not when I found out my dad was drinking again.
7. When thinking about my cat’s fur.
8. Not after seeing the person who tried to ruin my life bringing their mail in.
9. When remembering art school.
10. When thinking about being hit.
I was always a big crier - I wonder if it was because I was put in school a year early so I was playing emotionally developmental catch up. I wonder if it was because of childhood depression and whenever I was alone with my thoughts it would plunge desperately into pondering doom and death.
Release, release, release.
I remember the burning hot of trying not to cry in middle school - having been teased for years for being a cry baby (in response to being teased for other things). An older girl named Alice approached me on the stairs of the cafeteria, which was a rented basement of a church and asked me why I was crying. I said I wasn’t. She put a large hand on my back and immediately I started sobbing. She told me don’t try to stop from crying, that only makes it worse. Don’t cry about crying she said, that’s dumb, just cry.
My tears had been a point of contention in my childhood and formative years- cited as a tactic of manipulation. When people talk about children being manipulative to get what they want I say, so what? They have so little power and so little tools. Language is clumsy, adults don’t listen anyway, their whole day is decided for them, they have such little choice.
My first girlfriend said I should make you cry more, you look so beautiful after.
I don’t think my tears were manipulation so much as release. So much held inside needs to go somewhere.
Crying too functions just as an expression of pain, it’s like bleeding from a cut. Hurt.
I once worked with a woman Felicia, who in addition to saving the children’s diapers to put in her garden also told me let cuts bleed. It was natural, she said, a tool to expel infection.
After going on testosterone - 2 ml a week injected into the chubbiest part of my belly - crying felt less of an everyday biological need, and more a weekly emotional spill. And following hospitalization, going on anti depressants, I couldn’t seem to eat, cry, or sleep.
To me those are all in the same category, not one with more emotional weight than the others. Crying is communication of a biological need. And very early on we are asked why. Why are you crying? Parents will ask, trying to find the source, to make it stop. To make the alarm of the crying stop. We wake up not to live but to turn off our alarm.
Why live? Why cry? Why eat? Why sleep?
There is no reason other than the reasons we construct.
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