My Tears
This is a pretty jumbled group of memories from a long time ago. I've been thinking about past episodes of depression. For some reason I have been dwelling on crying. It’s something I want to do more of, does that seem odd? I think it's because being able to feel and express my emotions is something I have been working on. I see crying as some kind of marker in the road of progress.
I think I’ve been reflecting on this because of the number of people who have reached out to me. We’ve all grown up in a society that conditioned us to think that showing emotion was a bad thing. And crying? That’s for weak people. The male role models of my youth were stoic, apparently unfeeling tough guys. So generations of men have developed what they project to the world based on the idea that they have no emotions. We are allowed to celebrate a great triumph or victory, but face up to actual emotions? Never. I don’t want my son to grow up like that. So now I’ve got to re-learn it, to teach him.
Anyway, here’s what I was remembering.
In one of the memories, I’m living in Wilton with two of my friends. So it must be 2006 (maybe). I have driven myself to university. Up through the back roads of Wilton, Northland and Kelburn in the mid-morning. I pull into a car park on Salamanca road right outside the tennis courts. I turn off the car and take off my seatbelt, but the radio is still going. I should be grabbing my bag or books, but I can’t move. So I sit there for a while.
I’ve sat there so long now that I’m now late for the start of my lecture. I’m cognisant of the fact that I’m draining the car battery so I turn it all the way off. But I still can’t move. I’ve probably been sitting there for twenty minutes now. I’m not super passionate about my studies at this point, but I usually at least go. Especially if I’ve actually driven all the way there. This is weird. I feel weird.
All of a sudden I start crying uncontrollably. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve cried as an adult. Most of which have been while drunk or when someone significant in my life has passed away, or both. But this time was different, it came out of nowhere and was to me, about nothing.
So I’m very upset, but also super confused. What the hell is going on and where did this come from? I then become aware that lots of people walk down that road. Someone could walk past any minute and see and very likely hear me. The chances that I know that person are also probably pretty high. So I quickly turn on my car and drive home, hoping like hell that no one is in the flat.
In the next memory, it’s my paternal grandfathers’ funeral. It’s been a long day. Out to the Wairarapa for a church service then back to my parents place, with aunts and uncles and close family friends. So I begin to drink and talk to people I haven’t seen in a while.
A few hours pass and I’m quite drunk as the crowd begins to thin out. At some point, I overhear my dad say something like ‘what do you worry about, when the thing you’ve been worrying about finally happens?’. And it hit me hard. I had been empathising with him about losing your father obviously. But I hadn’t thought about how stressed he might have been about it happening for an extended period of time.
The next thing I know I’ve locked myself in the laundry and am bawling my eyes out. Uncontrollably crying, loudly. I don’t know who is still there, the crowd has definitely thinned out by now. But whoever is still there can hear me wailing through the walls of the kitchen. At first I won’t let anyone in and I can’t say what the matter is. In fact in my memory of this I don’t think I ever explain to anyone what set me off. Eventually, I let my dad in and we hug and I get the rest of it out before putting myself to bed.
The thing that gets me about this memory is how completely I lost it. I was completely overcome. For a few minutes there I didn’t know if I could stop crying. I was so drunk and so out of control of my emotions that it scares me to this day. I think this plays into a lot of my anxiety with drinking. I’m always worrying about my ability to control myself and how my emotions might betray me if I do lose control. I'll write something specifically about drinking though.
I’ve been thinking about crying a lot as I mature and understand myself more. The fact that I don’t do it seems rooted in some antiquated ideal of myself. That I don’t need to, or that I don’t have feelings that would bring me to tears. But as I understand myself more, I’m not sure this predisposition is helping me. Acknowledging sadness and trauma is something I’m trying to do. I hope being able to experience those feelings fully, will help me deal with them more positively.
Thinking about crying as a means of allowing your body and mind to process feelings is not something I’d ever contemplated as a young man. As part of this exercise I stumbled across this article https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319631. The long and short of which is that it highlights eight physiological benefits in crying. Stress relief, oxytocin and endorphin release were what I expected to find, and are in there. But it’s actually good for your eyesight too. Who knew?
I’m 37 now and have always thought of it as a weakness, or a display of feelings that I should keep private. So the work to unlearn that and allow myself to cry is hard. To be completely honest, I still haven’t managed to do it. But I am getting better at allowing myself to feel feelings. I’m definitely better at it now that I was a year ago and think I’m heading in the right direction.
I guess I have to keep working on it, much like I do with everything else.