Alain de Botton wrote an essay for the Substack newsletter, The Isolation Journals, titled Permission To Cry. Author Botton wrote about the absence of tears in adult culture, as though people are made to chuck emotions along with their baby teeth.
“It is a sign of the supreme wisdom of small children that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears. They have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world than a typical adult: They know that they are only extremely small beings in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can’t control much of what is happening around them, that their powers of understanding are limited, and that there is a great deal to feel distressed, melancholy, and confused about.”
As a point of reference, I lost access to most of my emotions with my baby teeth. Which is an odd word choice since “lost” implies I had a hand in their sociological removal. I did not. The route to them was painstakingly hijacked, each emotion pried from my tiny heart by harsh treatment and the announcement that my tears were overmuch.
“Drama queen.”
In the schoolyard, being called “crybaby” was at the top of the insult list, further enforcing the doctrine that heart-rending emotions weren’t wanted. To be an adult, one had to become tearless in public.
I noticed my general lack of emotion when a friend sobbed in a Panera after I told her about the death of my dog. I cried for days, and then the tears stopped. By the time I met the friend in Panera, they had evaporated. I imagined, as I watched tears and snot stream down Susie’s face, that it must feel horribly sublime to sob in public. Sixteen years later, another friend cried in Panera, and I again pondered the horribly sublime act of having easy access to tears.
Anwesenheit by Antje Duvkot
Nearly two Januarys ago, I became aware of crying while not wholly in or wholly out of dreaming and was not able to understand the reason for my weeping. Of course, there were dozens of obvious reasons to cry; I just could not feel a single one. Enormous, heaving sobs wrenched through my body, protectively curling into a ball and burying deeper into the blankets. I remotely watched the form of me from the ceiling, wondering what I was crying about and how my body had secretly managed it. The last time I had previously wept until my pillow was sopping was when my beloved dog, Bonni Blue, died in 2007. As I watched the me crying, the inability to feel the cause drew my focus, and eventually this shut the tears off as if they had never existed.
More from Sir Botton:
“We all originally came from a very tight ball-like space. For the first nine months of our existence, we were curled up, with our head on our knees, protected from a more dangerous and colder world beyond by the position of our limbs. In our young years, we knew well enough how to recover this ball position when things got tough. If we were mocked in the playground or misunderstood by a snappy parent, it was instinctive to go up to our room and adopt the ball position until matters started to feel more manageable again. Only later, around adolescence, did some of us lose sight of this valuable exercise in regression and thereby began missing out on a chance for nurture and recovery.”
One day last week, I shed three bloody tears. Not actual blood; the experience felt as though my heart and guts were internally shredding from their locations to shriek one…two…three down my face. A great sea holds decades of my tears, and when three escape, I am paid back in agony. Eerily, a day later, my dog Pi turned his face toward my outstretched hand to receive a bit of cheese. Just beneath one eye and running down his cheek was a thick thread of horror-movie-style blood. I was speechless while he wolfed down cheese as bloody tears gathered on the fur beneath his jowls.
I’m rather fond of weeping willows. The draping curve of dozens of branches and, if aged enough, the graceful sway as the breeze ruffles their feathers.
I imagine a weeping willow was named for the river of tears flooding down a crybaby’s face.
I’m so glad Mr. Pi Man is okay. My animals, dog, cat, and two horses, are aging. I’ve lost and buried so many.
I dread when those tears will come again, gut wrenching, heart stopping, afraid it will never beat again. I think of tears as healing. I believe they are. But that knowledge does not ease the pain when they fall.
I love willows too. I always think of, as a child, the two, one on either side of our little dock jutting into our branch of the finger lakes where our house faced the water.
It is lovely reading your words, stirring my memories. I’m a fan.