Crying Is Our Birthright.

“Big boys don’t cry.”
“Be a good girl.”
“Wimp.”
“Can’t take it?”

There are so many ways we’re told that crying is bad.

As children, we’re told to stop crying. We’re given food instead of what we actually want. We’re left alone until we quiet down. When we reach school, our classmates ridicule us if we cry.

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, we have a deeply ingrained shame of crying. Men are regularly taught that anyone who cries is too emotional to make good decisions. Since almost half the population is composed of men, and a large majority of cultures are patriarchal, this casts a pall on anyone who needs to release their emotions, regardless of gender.

And it impacts us deeply.

Because we are taught to be ashamed to cry, we protect ourselves from that shame. We filter our expression, avoid being vulnerable, and choose our words to avoid bringing up painful topics. Or we weaponize crying, knowing the shame this brings upon others, the need for others to stop our crying.

We build up armor, dissociating from the pain and sorrow we experience. This allows us to be callous towards others, because we can’t feel the pain we cause them. If you ever visit a hospital nursery, you’ll see how, when one baby cries, the others join them. We are all intimately connected to each other’s emotions. By the time we’ve passed through school, we’ve learned to distance ourselves from crying people instead.

Our armor doesn’t only let us hurt others without feeling it. Armor is indiscriminate. Armor also keeps us from feeling the heights of life, too. We put more and more layers between us and the world, whether made of logic, fantasy, anger, or depression. And we can’t feel the world anymore.

And yet, when we look at our emotions, for most of us, there’s a forgotten truth about crying:

It was the first emotional expression we ever displayed.

When we left the warmth of the womb, we entered a bright, cold, dry, loud world. Our sensors – temperature, pressure, pain, light, smell – were all overwhelmed with new sensations. The world was literally painful. Then we had someone stuff a plastic nozzle into our nostrils, forcing cold air to come up from our mouths into our newly-exposed nasal passages.

Then they chopped through the flesh of our umbilical cord.

We screamed.

Our second emotional experience was relief as we nestled against our mothers. But the first was pain. And we told the world about it.

Crying is our birthright.

When we allow ourselves to cry, when we remove the stigma, sorrow simply flows, just as joy does. We cry for as long as we need, then are done, nothing held back. Like children on the playground, we fall, cry, and get back up to run laughing again.

So much of our fear of feeling sorrow comes from feeling our fear alongside it. Without the fear, sorrow is incredibly warming. When tears flow without resistance, there is a warm release to it, like exhaling after holding our breath. It’s incredibly grounding, an acceptance of what gave us pain. I liken it to being a child held in the lap of a big squishy grandma, engulfed in their warmth as they let us let it out: “There, there.”

It can be challenging! The drive to avoid crying started before we were really cognizant of our sense of identity. We were raised by parents who, at best, were trying to raise us to fit into an emotionally intolerant society, or, at worst, had their own trauma to work out around crying. Crying can feel incredibly foreign and vulnerable, even frightening. We may have a lot of built up sorrow to release, and have no idea how to keep our sanity while so exposed.

I’m not ready to suggest different ways to start crying again. We each have different triggers, different thresholds, different stamina, different support systems.

But I know it’s worth reclaiming our capacity to cry.