Last week on a long-haul flight coming back to Europe from the US, I sat next to an elderly German woman with big red hair who from our minimal interactions made it quite clear that she did not speak English. Soon after take off, she turned to me (I was in the window) with a look of absolute distress on her face (probably from being in the middle seat of a packed airplane on an 11-hour flight, so many things are truly not fair in life and the middle seat is absolutely one of them) as she pointed to the screen and started tapping desperately with the tip of her (also red!) long painted fingernail repeating the word “Musik? Musik?” louder and louder as her chin wiggled from side to side making her matching long coral drop earrings shake in a way that added to the sense of urgency.
Message received, I sprung into action, changing the language on her entertainment system to German and showed her how to find the safe approachable array of inoffensive plane music, that now feels somewhat like a relic from a pre-smartphone world. She thanked me with a big universally intelligible thumbs up as she flopped back into her seat with full force. I glanced over to make sure she was all good and found her aggressively swiping at lightning speed. She swiftly settled on ‘The Best of Beethoven’. A couple of minutes in, I suddenly start to hear what sounds like sobbing. I look up at her screen and there it is No. 14 – Moonlight Sonata.
That’ll do it. Her crying is gentle and soft. I wondered where her tears were coming from. It’s also true that we are more susceptible to crying on planes. Scientists say its to do with the altitude, darkness and the fact that by getting on the plane itself, we are surrendering to an experience we have no control over. In this case lets us also factor in the added factor of the mysterious way that classical music also has the capacity to bring up unexpected, powerful emotional responses. I thought about how, or even if I should react. My pocket was loaded with tissues but would she be embarrassed by this well-meaning gesture? I took a breath and tried to feel it out. Somehow this soft cry, to this song, at this moment, somehow felt like what she maybe needed. And so this time, I sat back and did nothing.
When I told a friend about this particular do I/do I not get involved conundrum, she shared with me how she recently visited a place where she used to live many years ago and as she arrived at the station she felt flooded with memories of her past life there. This remembering immediately brought her to tears. Upon walking out of the station, an elderly woman stopped to ask her if she was alright. Through her sobs, my friend explained to her the melancholic nostalgia that had taken over her. The woman said she deeply resonated with that feeling and proceeded to give her a big hug and they went their separate ways. My friend said she was so touched by this simple but surprising interaction. That it was the comfort she didn’t know she needed but was truly grateful for.
Even though I am the strongest of believers in the power of interacting and talking to strangers (because doing so suddenly makes them not strangers anymore), what to do or in this case what not to do when you see someone crying in public is a hard call to make. Crying? can feel so private even when it happens to us in our own homes, behind closed doors with the people we love or even when we’re alone. The sounds we can make, the wailing, hiccups, the snot trickles, the hyperventilating. Intervening doesn’t always feel appropriate. Sometimes we want to be seen and witnessed and at other times we want to crawl into a ball and have the floor beneath us swallow us whole and both are valid. But that woman on the plane, and this question about what we do when these things happen, felt so personal to me because these days the person crying in public is usually me.
I cry all the time. Just yesterday, I cried three times, all of them in public.
The first cry happened as I waited for the tram in the morning from not my usual stop and as I was waiting I realised I was in front of the San Vittore prison in Milan that spans blocks and blocks of the area, a haunting presence of surreal doom in an otherwise ‘normal’ seeming neighbourhood where everyone else is walking past living out their daily lives. People I speak to about it seemed to not even notice it anymore. I’ve driven past it so many times by now, but from this new angle, I found myself almost being able to see into the cells. I suddenly felt the urge to look it up to learn more about it while I was waiting and was surprised to see that recent photos of the cells had been uploaded by numerous people onto Google Maps, the prison is old, falling apart and as archaic as the punitive justice system. The recent photos show 6 to a room, 3 sets of bunk beds pushed together in a tiny cell, someone has even uploaded a photo of the solitary confinement enclosure. The prison was originally built in 1879 for 600 inmates and since 2018 has been holding over double its capacity. I read that out of the total Italian prison population of around 55,000, 10% had left school before the age of 14 and 900 were illiterate. I looked back up and saw a silhouette of a body in the window looking out into the city and the tears begin to fall down my face. No one at the tram stop noticed.
The second big cry happened on my way home, back on the tram (and yes, I’m seeing my own theme here, maybe this piece should just be called crying on trams) as I started reading the latest news about the aftermath of the earthquakes in Syria and Türkiye. As of today, news outlets say there are over 40,000 victims so far with countless others still unaccounted for. The WHO is calling it the ‘worst natural disaster’ of the last century. With so many lives lost at once, I can’t help but think that that kind of sudden loss must release ripples of deep grief and sorrow out into the atmosphere, for how could we not feel the impact of their pain? I look up from my screen and see that the tram is fuller than usual. Some have noticed me and are trying not to stare. I hid in my scarf and let it catch my teardrops. No one says or does anything and today I am grateful for their discretion.
All this crying is actually a huge personal turnaround for me as up until relatively recently I spent most of my life struggling to cry. I think losing the ability (or the access) to cry (ing) was a survival mechanism that took over when my dad died just before my 9th birthday. It probably had something to do with subconsciously feeling like I needed to hold it together while I saw the other adults in my life fall apart. It probably had something to do with me being the eldest of my siblings and subconsciously feeling like I needed to be what I thought at the time was being ‘strong’. I wanted to be teleported to the Emerald City to ask the Great Oz for tears for someone as sensitive as me, it felt weird to feel all this balled-up sadness, but not be able to just release it in the form of actual crying. Like a fizzing bottle of champagne with the cork stuck halfway, bubbling to go but unable to pop. I would literally say “I feel like crying” and nothing would follow. I was backed up and this feeling really made me feel like I was broken. But like Cameron Diaz in ‘The Holiday’, I too had my moment where that block suddenly cleared and my tear ducts came back to work.
My proverbial cork of tears finally popped at my maternal English/Irish grandmother Marion Sheila's funeral, not long after the end of a bad relationship. There was something about being at this funeral that suddenly gave me permission to let it all go, to grieve all my sorrows at once. The death of my grandmother whom I loved so much, as well as the death of my toxic relationship. I was grieving the fantasy of a future no longer possible, grieving the dizzying myths I had believed about love. My sweet grandmother left this earth still in love with a man who had treated her absolutely terribly and it was like my tears were an acknowledgement of an end of a pattern. That this wasn’t going to be my path. Halfway through the service, I became hysterical and completely wild. I fell to the floor as I lost control of myself, my back spasmed and I made sounds I never heard myself make. My mother and sister looked at me bewildered since they had never seen me like this before. My brother held my hand not knowing what else to do. Members of my mother’s family were eyeing me up as if to say ‘we really didn’t know you were going to take it this hard?’. Deep down I’m sure I was also crying tears I never got to cry for my father when he died, as when that happened I didn’t really have the capacity to understand what I had just lost. So often the catalyst for our tears can be a portal for reaching something much deeper that has been lying dormant in our bodies waiting to come out. After so many years of sealed obstruction, this was my time. My literal floodgates had been opened and I feel like I’ve been crying so much ever since.
We are truly living in trying times, thus crying times as each day we experience the effects of being so utterly disconnected from the earth and each other. Last week I listened to an interview with Margaret Wheatly, one of the principal conscious thinkers when it comes to re-imagining leadership and building communities who says she has given up on thinking that an emergence of a new social order is possible without more utter destruction. Quoting the work of Peter Senge a leading MIT emerging systems scientist who says that major shifts in consciousness on a collective level are starting to happen but for this kind of giant overhaul of change to take place, it’s going to take about 300 to 400 years. Let’s take a breath and let that settle for a second. (Please actually take this breath.) 300 to 400 years with so much more destruction in between, as no new order in history has ever come to be by being handed down from the powers that be that benefitted from it, they always had to be fought for. Margaret (or Meg as she also likes to go by) says that for those of us who are called to be of service to a better and more just world, we have to have days where we stop and grieve. That we have to allow days to completely fall apart as well as find ways to work these feelings out of the body so that we can pick ourselves back up and find the love in our hearts to keep going nevertheless, even if we will not live to see the changes we yearn for in our lifetimes.
The human story is one of love, redemption, kindness, and generosity but it is also a story of pain, filled with division, neglect, and cruelty. The spectrum of why we cry tells us so: our tears of sorrow, our tears of joy. So, we stand here faced with these juxtaposed realities. That we can choose to soften and do what we can to soothe the suffering. Or we can also choose to live in fear and denial—doing all that we can to guard our hearts from being touched, too afraid of drowning in what can feel like a deep ocean of despair. Time and time again and again it feels as if we are being asked to learn one of life’s most important lessons. That to run from suffering—to harden our hearts, to refuse our pain—is to deny life itself. So, as arduous and scary as it is to open our hearts and stay with the trouble, those of us who have the capacity to, must try, as doing so is the most direct path to our transformation and liberation.
My third and final cry yesterday happened last night while I was in the first session of a somatic dance and movement workshop that I’m currently partaking in. There was a moment in our group practice where we had to take turns expressing our literal/physical boundaries by gesturing with our fingers how many of our fellow student’s hands we were willing to let touch us at the same time, while we took turns moving freely, facing away from the group. I started to dance alone but at one point I found myself saying yes to everyone’s hands, there were 6 of us total meaning there were 12 hands on my body supporting me from behind and the beauty of suddenly going from moving alone to moving collectively as one was so powerful, it moved me to tears, but this time they were happy tears. Happy tears that reminded me of what I needed to remember, that even amongst strangers, I am not alone here. That it is possible, to move as one. That another world is possible if we learn to move together.
Feeling like we can’t or shouldn’t cry in public (or even alone) feels like another side effect of capitalism where falling apart is ‘inconvenient’ to the system that has created the environment to blame for so many of our tears in the first place. This makes allowing ourselves to be seen by others breaking down and crumbling, even more, of a radical act. My tears are a sign that I am alive and unfurling each day like a new baby leaf by allowing myself to feel what I couldn’t before. Each tear connects you and me and all of us like a river that helps us swim towards the ocean of our shared humanity.
PS. if you’ve made it this far: I’m trialling some new changes to the way my paid subscription works. I’ve added a few bits as I would really like to start to cultivate this place as my online home and I’d love to connect with you all more in a deeper way. A paid monthly subscription now gets you into a group chat with me where can discuss all kinds of things in more depth and the founding memberships now also include a custom hand-drawn postcard from me as well as 2 x 30 min personal hang sessions on Zoom with me. I will be donating all the money generated from new subscriber-signups for the next month to the Guardians Equality Movement founded and led by Syrian LGBTQIA+ Human Rights Defenders, Activists, and Survivors/Victims/Refugees who strive to prevent a repeat of and protect others from the suffering and violations that occurred against them. In the aftermath of the earthquake they are supporting basic relief and rehabilitation needs for very marginalised groups. Here is a list of other resources to donate to the relief efforts across the region made by Closer Than You Think uplifted by our friends at the Slow Factory.
Thank you for reading <3
18. on crying in public
Once again, you have hit my inbox with the exact topic that I needed ❤️🩹 this week I cried like never before and I hit a dark rock bottom, since that moment life has done nothing but show me light, this post being exactly that: light. Every post you share feels like so much more than words on a screen. Thank you ☁️
This is the most painfully hopeful piece of writing ✍️ thanks