5:32pm June 2, 2014

I hate crying.

Meaning, I hate when I do it (except when it’s from reading a sad book or something…in that case it at least feels like a reasonable response). It’s totally involuntary and mostly seems to happen when I’m incredibly frustrated about something and/or experiencing cognitive/language shutdown. I know it makes no sense to be embarrassed about a physiological *thing* that happens sometimes, but there’s this whole cultural idea that crying is a thing people do to emotionally manipulate others.

And while I guess maybe that’s true for some people, I personally have never been able to either start *or* stop crying by sheer act of will. But I can’t do anything about how it’s perceived. And I know that even when people know me well and understand that crying doesn’t mean I’m sad or in need of “comforting”…they are having to fight through a lot of cultural and possibly even biological programming to look past the tears and not assign more significance to them than they actually have.

It’s not like I cry very *often* as an adult, but when I do it isn’t “cute” or demure crying. It’s the “can’t talk coherently, oh wow there is snot dripping out of my nose onto the floor” type. And it has this horrible habit of happening when I really, REALLY just want to be invisible/not make a scene/not do anything whatsoever to draw any attention to myself. It’s like my body is hijacking itself and forcing me to look conspicuous when that’s the absolute last thing I want in the universe. I can avoid crying sometimes if I leave a situation and go somewhere less overwhelming, but *that* can also look conspicuous in a lot of cases. Again, I know, involuntary physiological processes = nothing to be ashamed of, but I just despise that feeling of intense vulnerability so much and I wish I had a sure-fire method to stave it off. :/

Exactly, same, all of that, here. :-/

Notes: