how to cry pt.1

Step 1: Be alone.

Step 2: Make your space as dark as possible.

Step 3: Deprive yourself of water, food, any form of sustenance. 

Step 4: Keep bathroom visits to an absolute minimum, only going when your bladder physically pains to an unbearable intensity. You will know when this time comes.

Step 5: Find content to consume, you don’t want to be bored. If your boredom overpowers your sadness, you will leave your sad space. And this is not what we want.

*I personally recommend the Ready to Die album by Notorious B.I.G for music, and Insatiable on Netflix for a bingeable T.V series.

Step 6: Remind yourself of moments where people have not loved you well, then project that onto any and all of your current relationships. This will help convince you that no one loves you. 

Step 7: If all else fails, come out of your sad bubble, just for a moment. In this time, start a fight with someone you really care about. Best case, they meet your hostility with more hostility. And congratulations, this interaction validated your growing comprehension that no one loves you. Worse case, they lean in. They recognize that you’re hurting, and give you a little extra compassion. Wow. What a good, good person. And you just intentionally tried to harm them. THEM. A good person. Again, congratulations, because you’re still terrible. 

And this is how to cry. 

I have a hard time getting in touch with my tears. But, anytime I want to, this process has yet to fail me. I’m not selfish, so I thought I’d share.

I was just having a conversation about my unhealthy relationship to accessing emotion. It feels like I’m always on an extreme, either disconnected or entirely enveloped. Both unhelpful. Both chaotic, and inconvenient to my relationship with self, and other. Mostly, and especially, because my default emotion is anger. 

And so, I swing from stone-cold emotional unavailability, to sudden bursts of intense anger. Thing is, both of these states look very much the same. I don’t have the slam-the-door-on-my-way-out kind of fury. I like to dabble in the, and-this-is-where-I-activate-more-walls kind. I’m not like other girls, I’m layered

(an outright joke, if you don’t know me personally).

I enter into a mode, where my sole purpose is to condense the person’s presence in my life. I restrict myself, limiting any opportunity to share or receive vulnerability. I delete photos, messages. I throw away gifts, mementos. I don’t listen to any music, watch any show that we shared. 

I’ve even, in an incredible show of pettiness, removed emojis from contact names.

No more warmth. For this no longer can be yours. 

Ever since being diagnosed with PTSD, I’ve come to understand my anger at its core, is just fear. I am constantly rebelling against the idea that I am not safe, physically or otherwise, by each intimate space I welcome. This rebellion is done with much, much hesitation. So much so, that any disappointment in relationships results in a seemingly unreasonable reaction, where I emotionally ghost. 

A friend accused me of this once; of being an emotional ghost. 

Feelings get confusing. They get all jumbled in my body- it’s hard to know which ones are which. So I just call everything by one name. That makes things simpler. Only, also, in the same breath, even more difficult.

The reality is, usually when we can’t identify something, it’s because we aren’t close enough. We stand at distances, refusing to move, squinting our eyes until, in our frustrated defeat, we resort to mislabeling. 

To anger we say, “you are sad.”

To fear we say, “you are jealous.”

So then, to anger we say, “here, let’s make sad spaces. Let’s melt in bed. We can listen to Adele, and cry, and eat candy til we’re sick. We’ll be happy then.”

So then, to fear we say, “let’s practice gratitude. Or let’s work hard, so we can get what they have. We’ll be happy then.”

This is a dangerous practice.