Crying Isn’t A Sign Of Weakness, So Let’s Stop Saying It Is
I have always been a person who feels. In my entire life, rarely has apathy been a regular emotion in my day-to-day toolbox. For better or for worse, my often intense emotions are a part of who I am. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to the creative, the imaginative; it all involves feeling. Deeply. As one can guess, these feelings can invoke physical manifestations that many others can relate to. For instance, it is natural to catch ourselves clenching our fists when we are frustrated. We may tap our toes when we are anxious, or try to avoid eye contact (just me?). We may laugh when we are happy; our bodies may tremble when we are nervous. And when we’re sad, we may cry. Of course, crying isn’t reserved for the “negative” emotions. We cry of happiness, of anger, stress, and of fear.
For some reason, society has taught us that crying also signifies weakness. Of letting down your guard (not always a bad thing, by the way), leaving you vulnerable and, in a way, utterly naked. By crying, you’re displaying your lack of self-control, your failure to “hold it together.” Such a raw, personal display of emotion is sure to make others around you uncomfortable, so it is best not to subject anyone to your tears or angst if you want to appear, for lack of a better term, stable.
None of this could be further from the truth.
On the contrary, I argue that crying can be a sign of strength––by doing so, you are releasing your emotions and allowing yourself to be open. Not even necessarily to others, but with yourself, which is perhaps even more important. Crying alone can be just as terrifying as in a roomful of strangers, because you’re the one experiencing and processing not just the crying itself, but what triggered it, whether it’s a tangible event––i.e, grief, or an overall sense of being, i.e. depression. However, perhaps a part of why it can seem so scary to unleash your emotions is the societal stigma around it.
Like many things in life, this can also be gendered. How many times have you heard “boys don’t cry” or a similar iteration of this phrase? By repeating it over and over, and normalizing this point-of-view, we are encouraging people to suppress their emotions, a recipe for disaster that manifests in every aspect of one’s life. This is not to say that women are also encouraged not to show this kind of vulnerability; we are. All. The. Time. Sexism and misogyny still permeates into our beings and ways of seeing the world, even when we’re not conscious of it. But it’s inaccurate to say that our collective perception of emotions affects each other equally.
Why should anyone be ashamed of crying in public? What’s so scary about someone simply expressing their emotions? And why are people who do so accused of doing it for attention? What’s the gain when we’re conditioned to associate tears with humiliation and frailty? What kind of attention would the perpetrator be looking for?
Crying isn’t a negative thing at all. It’s actually quite healthy. When we cry, our tears release stress hormones from our bodies, ultimately improving our mental and even physical wellbeing. It also has a self-soothing effect by activating the parasympathetic nervous system (as I type out that word, I feel like a Nobel Prize-winning doctor), and calming us down. Tears can even fight harmful bacteria! The positive effects are overwhelming––perhaps most important of all, crying allows us to acknowledge our emotions and understand ourselves better.
If I find myself crying during a certain moment of a movie (some fun trivia: the first time I nearly cried at a movie was during “Show Yourself” in Frozen 2), later I may ask myself: why? Did I subconsciously connect with a certain part of the story that could be traced back to my own life? Am I just a sympathetic crier? A total empath? Or maybe, at the end of the day, it was just a sad or uplifting scene. Maybe it was both. Neither. A concoction of simple or complicated emotion.
It is hard to even scratch the surface as to what crying represents. People from cultures around the world all have their own unique way of living expressing themselves, but the thing that connects us all is basic human emotions. We all smile when we’re happy. We all laugh when something’s funny. And we all cry…when we cry.
