Crying
Do you cry?
Can you?
Will you?
Might you try?
In order to be a Good Man, I cauterised my emotions. I could take lots of pain, and smile. Being a Good Man was the only option, modelled by movies and men around me. Being gay was a slur and it was casually and liberally thrown by pupils and teachers and relatives as a means to police any showing of affect or affection. Like an imprint in drying mud of a new army boot, tracking my direction in life was clear as it was shaped by the sharp pattern of the mythical Good Man. I identified as an officer, a soldier, a martial artist and other such popular extreme manly idealised tropes. I don’t remember my mother ever hugging or cuddling me, which even now, is hard to write. Loud depreciating self ridicule, instantly rises from within me and from our culture to censure and protect me. And additionally everyone wants to believe, everyone needs to believe at a deep and fundamental level that their mother cared, that they mattered. Wise and rational parts of me are more and more convinced of the many ways in which nurturement is essential . And yet, as a teenager ‘the L-word’ was the proxy we used, perhaps in defence of naming what we all understood should not be said out loud, a naive strategy for keeping the ridicule at bay. And yet even now, the ridicule remains, the fear of naming a fundamental human need for love. Love matters so very much if we want to live and to contribute to something other than a sociopathic, and warring society. Oh boy, back then was I a sociopathic, Good Man. I had to be. And now, I can ask, what kind of society was I being groomed to contribute to?
In my early twenties after a headlong rush into whatever I could find to distract, and entertain myself, I came to begin to realise that I couldn't cry. And that maybe this was a Bad Thing. It took a few years of work, but eventually I was able to let water leak from my eyes. After that I named not being able to cry to being like not being able to orgasm. And yet, 30 years later, I am still working with learning to cry. The imprints of The Good Man still authoritatively manipulating me like a ghostly puppeteer.
Might it be possible for me to cry each day, as a practise? I would like to, just like I would like to be in choice and to enjoy sexual intimacy with people with male genitalia, to be ‘gay’. Yet there is a deep and reactive part of me that holds a firm barrier that has protected me from ridicule and at the same time, limiting my choices to enjoy my life with less shame or fear.
I have compassion for the patterns imprint in me, and gratitude. Being a Good Man was the only way to get some kind of belonging, and for surviving the emotional desert of growing up in the body of the British establishment. And, oh boy, did it allow me to do some incredible things, some insanely foolish things too, as I situated myself as both incredibly 'hard' and simultaneously completely disposable. I was so resilient. So strong. I could push my body past all the messages that I was damaging myself. I had curated the Good Man skills along with lightening reflexes and zero guilt sociopathy.
And with it came depression. And ADHD.
I so mourn. I mourn the lost years, the richness of a fuller emotional life, an evolutionary birthright of what could and perhaps should have been.
I need to cry. I want to cry alone, with myself, each day. But until yesterday, I have been unaware that I deeply feared doing crying alone. It was as if some ethereal and omnipresent Good Man will judge me as lacking, as weak, as gay, or issue that painful refrain, 'You are too sensitive'.
And, welcome tears, thank you.
Thank you for the work that led to here, Thank you to the part that protected me so well, and thank you for the work that makes joy more possible.