Some of you may know that I cry at everything. Matt laughs gently at it, and I don’t blame him—I remember laughing when I was a child at my mother’s sudden brimmings. I had to start laughing out of the other side of my mouth as I got older, and the Waterworks came for me.
At first, it was controllable. I would start crying earlier on in something already weepworthy—“Somewhere in Time”, for instance. Then really happy endings started to get me more often. Soon, I was crying at teasers for “Dinosaur” ‘because it’s so beautiful!’ (if I’d known there was TALKING in it, I would have cried for DIFFERENT reasons.) I cried at “Alien Resurrection”. I cried at “Dead Again” every time until the sixth time. Of course I cried at “Terminator”, that’s not ludicrous. In perhaps an all time record, I think that “Return to Me” had me tissue-taking within the first three minutes.
Don’t think I’m too weird here, but I like to cry at movies and books. It feels good in a way that crying for yourself never does. You wash off your heart by giving it to someone else - a someone else who doesn’t exist, so their woes needn’t linger too long. But what I wonder is why I get so much worse over time. The most obvious explanation, is, of course, hormones, which has a great deal of correlation going for it - now that puberty’s done, I guess the hormonal change is “gradually becoming a Mom-like person.” But there are other things about which I wonder.
Do children, very small children, cry like that? I don’t think so…it’s kind of pointless, really, to cry about something your parents can’t fix for you—which, sorry, boys ‘n’ girls, does apply to Romeo and Juliet, and Bambi’s mom. So is it purely the process of becoming less selfish that brings on this empathy? I think one of the reasons I cry more now may very well be that (let’s face it, most tearjerkers are romantic in nature) I am in a couple, I can sympathize much more vividly with being tragically decoupled. Do people become less selfish, or does their sphere of experience expand so that they can relate fictional experiences more clearly to their selves?
Another theory I have is that it’s because I’m less angsty now than I was as a lonely high school student. Maybe happiness makes you more open, less inhibited. Of course, maybe you just have a larger sink of sorrow in you to draw upon as you get older, more grandparents die, you know more of what is wrong in the world, et c. Very contradictory theories.
For now, I’ll just keep on trying not to let Matt see the Xena credits are making me tear up.
Comments
Crying as an emotional release valve
I don’t know why it works, or how, but crying is probably one of the strangest things that can happen to the human body. It’s almost literally like opening the floodgates when the dam can’t hold back the emotions any longer. I’m not sure why it works that way. Are people the only animals that cry?
Being able to cry is a sign that you keep your emotions close to the surface, I think. Years ago, when I was a very different person, it wasn’t uncommon for me to tear up at a movie or something emotionally stirring. Eventually, though, as I began burying my emotions deeper and deeper under the surface, crying became a very rare thing. When it did happen, it was because I had buried things for so long and to such an extent that I couldn’t contain them anymore. It was the sort of crying that would only happen once a year, but that leaves you totally fucked up for a good three days, after which you have to slowly piece yourself back together (and install new and improved emotional shielding to ensure that it doesn’t happen again).
It’s probably a real bad pattern to fall into. It’s been years since I’ve cried. Who knows what’ll happen next time. So yeah, it’s a good thing that you cry. Keep it up. It’s like an emotional enema. Good for what ails you.
I bet that’s why I like movies so much. Movies fuck with your emotions, whether you want them to or not. They force you to feel. That sure is a lot easier than actually feeling on your own. By a strange coincidence, at movie night tonight, we watched Full Frontal, which is a movie about how movies provide an emotional release for fucked up people. Ha.
Other Theory
I think people have a fundamental need to experience grief and sorrow and things like that on a regular basis. I don’t think that art necessarily provides a release valve for stuff that’s in you that you can’t let out, but rather that it provides you with a way to vicariously experience sensations that you can’t experience directly - or in this case, would rather not experience directly - but that are still valuable and necessary sensations to experience.
Re: Other Theory
I think you’re smart. That seems very true, to the point where I’m hitting my head and saying “duh”. However, it still leaves “Why Felicity cries more than other people>” Maybe I require more emotional sustenance.