Crying is My Superpower.

What’s yours?

I love crying. It’s cathartic. Every time I cry, I feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest.

Crying, though, for whatever reason, has a gloomy image today. We learn early on in life that when we see someone cry, we’re supposed to ‘console’ them and ‘make them feel better’, which is just a euphemism for ‘get them to shut up’. If you ever see me cry, don’t even try to console me.

I sob to express sorrow, yes, but only occasionally. You cannot possibly ask me to stop crying when I hear about the plight of a loved one. But more often than that, it’s my anger that comes out in the form of tears. I don’t know why it is this way, but heated arguments with me usually involve the other person arguing verbally and me replying with tears. Sometimes, it’s downright exasperating because the tears seem to come out more readily than words.

If not anger, I cry out of frustration. I let the flood gates down and bawl my eyes out, and almost instantly feel better. It’s probably counterintuitive, but it is what it is: not being able to cry when I want to makes me feel horrendous. My heart feels like it’s teeming with rage, irritation, apprehension and discomfort. What’s worse, resisting my urge to cry only gives me a pounding headache.

I live in an environment where crying is not recognized as a superpower. It is seen as something to avoid, something you do if you’re ‘weak’. God only knows what’s weak about expressing your emotions, coming to terms with them and getting on with life feeling a dozen times better than you were before you cried.

Apparently, I love crying because it’s a ‘feminine trait’. So when I cry, I’m just living up to a stereotype. But no. I cry because it makes me human, not because it makes a woman. If there’s so much stigma around a girl crying, I can only imagine how much worse it must be for guys. It seems like our whole objective as human beings is to live as hard, empty shells capable of showing zero emotion. If you’re a woman, okay, maybe you can cry sometimes. It’s in your nature, after all. If you’re a man, don’t be such a girl, bro.

I like to think of myself as an empathic person. I spend more time in fictional worlds than in the real one, and the former is replete with sorrows. Tell me, how can you not cry while reading a Jodi Picoult novel? Or while watching a movie about the Holocaust? If I had my way, I’d cry my heart out while watching such distress. But I don’t, because then someone will remind me that “it’s just a movie”. As if that is going to make a difference.

My wholehearted desire for the world is that one day we can cry when we want to. It’s such a beautiful thing; it’s sad how most people don't recognize it. You know how we hand people advice about smiling more to feel good? I hope one day we can also ask people to cry more for better emotional well-being.

P.S. Here I am, writing an article about how there’s nothing negative with crying. My Grammarly extension working simultaneously says, “This is how your text sounds to readers: sad”. *sigh* The sheer irony!