18. on crying in public

tears as tender resistance

Last week, on a long-haul flight returning to Europe from the US, I sat next to an elderly German woman with big red hair. From our minimal interactions, it was made 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 indeed 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 showing 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 ensure 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—— No. 14 , Moonlight Sonata. 

That’ll do it.

Her crying was 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 it has to do with altitude, darkness, and the fact that by getting on the plane itself, we surrender to an experience over which we have no control.

In this case, let us also factor in the added factor of the mysterious way that classical music can also bring up unexpected, robust 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, this song, at this moment, felt like what she 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. As she arrived at the station, she was flooded with memories of her past life there, which immediately brought her to tears.

Upon walking out of the station, an elderly woman stopped to ask my friend if she was all right. Through her sobs, my friend explained the melancholic nostalgia that had taken over her. The woman said she deeply resonated with that feeling, and it gave her a big hug, and they went their separate ways. My friend said this simple but surprising interaction touched her. It was the comfort she didn’t know she needed but was genuinely grateful for.

Even though I am the strongest believer in the power of interacting and talking to strangers (because doing so suddenly makes them not strangers anymore), knowing 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 a stop that was not my usual stop. As I was waiting, I realised I was in front of the San Vittore prison in Milan, which spans blocks and blocks of the area. It is 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 spoke to about it seemed not even to notice it anymore.

I’ve driven past it so many times by now, but from this new angle, I could almost see into the cells. While waiting, I suddenly felt the urge to look it up to learn more about it and was surprised to see that numerous people had uploaded recent photos of the cells onto Google Maps. The prison is old, falling apart and archaic as the punitive justice system. The recent images show 6 to a room, three 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 has been holding over double its capacity since 2018. 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 tears began 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 theme here; maybe this piece should just be called crying on trams) as I read 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 calls 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 a vast 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 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 say, “I feel like crying,” and nothing would follow. I was backed up, and this feeling made me feel broken. But like Cameron Diaz in ‘The Holiday’, I too had my moment where that block suddenly cleared and my tear ducts returned to work. 

My proverbial cork of tears finally popped at my maternal English/Irish grandmother Marion Sheila's funeral, not long after the most painful breakup with someone I thought I would be spending the rest of my life with.

There was something about being at this funeral that suddenly permitted me 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 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 had never heard myself make. My mother and sister looked at me, bewildered, since they had never seen me like this. My brother held my hand, not knowing what else to do. Members of my mother’s family were eyeing me as if to say ‘We didn’t think 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 couldn’t 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 cried 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. She 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, he says that significant shifts in consciousness on a collective level are starting to happen, but for this kind of giant overhaul of change to take place, it will 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 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 serve a better and more just world, we have to have days where we stop and grieve. That we have to allow days to entirely 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 and joy. So, we stand here faced with these juxtaposed realities.

We choose to soften and do what we can to soothe the suffering. Or we can also live in fear and denial—doing all 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, it feels like we are being asked to learn one of life’s most important lessons. 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 can must try, as doing so is the most direct path to our transformation and liberation.

My third and final cry happened last night while I was in the first session of a somatic dance and movement class I’ve just signed up for. 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 students’ 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 show 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 like a river that helps us swim towards the ocean of our shared humanity.

Thank you for reading <3