How to Handle A Plague, 13) Cry.

[gaudior]

13) Cry.

Some of you may already be totally on top of this one, and be more interested in figuring out how to stop crying. Which is very reasonable, and I hope to talk more about that soon.

But a lot of you may not have cried about the pandemic yet. For a lot of reasons. People talk about compartmentalizing-- about having the abstract intellectual knowledge that x hundred thousand people have died, but not having taken it in emotionally. Maybe they don't know anyone personally who has died of it, or even someone who's very sick. Maybe there hasn't been a single major incident in their life-- losing a job, say, or something similarly catastrophic, that feels like it would be the right reason to cry.

Here's the thing, though: even if you have not lost a person, you have still lost something. You've lost your normal routine, you've lost in-person contact with people you care about, you've lost your freedom to move around. You may have lost your job. You may have lost small businesses you loved and depended on. You may have lost your graduation ceremony; you may have lost the few hours of free time when your child would have been at school. You have almost certainly lost things you planned to do-- trips, concerts, holidays, weddings.

You may have lost your sense of security doing things as simple as going to the grocery store. You may have lost your sense of safety in the world.

You had things you were doing, and things you depended on, and things you loved, and now they are gone.

You have enough to cry about.

And this may not be true for everyone, but it was certainly true for me: crying helped. When I finally just broke down and sobbed, I was finally able to not be fine. I had been so insistently fine, because nothing big had changed, nothing catastrophic had happened to me personally or my family, and I was very competent and good at emotional regulation, so surely I could handle this?

But actually, I could not handle it. At least, not without crying, and grieving, and talking about how this is not okay, I cannot do this. It was not fine, and trying to make it be fine was only making me more stressed.

I think that grieving is the process by which you go from a world which is absolutely unbearable and inconceivable to one that you can live with. "Acceptance" doesn't mean you like it, or think it's okay, or agree that this is how the world should be. It just means that you are here with it, and it is real, and you know that, deep down in your bones.

There is a lot to grieve, in this pandemic. If you're like me, and your failure mode is to be so insistently functional, then I would like you to give yourself permission to stop.

It's not fine. It doesn't have to be fine. You don't have to wait for the other shoe to drop to start mourning.

--R

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

I don't cry like a normal person. I often wish I could, but it just doesn't happen, I'm not sure why. (I imagine the Celexa is part of it, but I was like this even before I went on an SSRI.) On a day a few weeks ago when I really needed an emotional release, I watched Avengers: Endgame because I knew it would trigger...something, and I did manage to cry a little, which helped.

[snippy]

I cry most days. But it's not as helpful as I'd like-I've talked in therapy about this, how I don't feel better for crying. I just feel tired and thirsty and I have a headache.

[mrissa]

And as I have amply learned over and over again these last ten months, acceptance is not a linear process.

[kore]

BOY THAT IS SURE A TRUE THING YOU HAVE SAID. My process of acceptance looks like a map of Ankh-Morpork (how does it go, "the same shape usually seen on the sidewalk just outside of an all-night takeaway").

[lilysea]

I rarely cry, and I don't find that crying provides any emotional relief at all. For me, crying makes a bad situation even worse.

Crying gives me a nasty headache that lasts for hours;

Crying gives me nasty sinus pain that lasts for hours or even leads to a sinus infection [I have narrow sinuses];

Crying gives me red itching flaking skin on my face because tears irritate my sensitive skin;

and there's also a risk of sobbing so hard that I can barely breathe - sobbing involuntarily with a forcefulness almost like vomiting.

I'm genuinely glad if crying helps some people, and I am all in favour of people giving themselves permission to cry, but for me, it's never been an emotional outlet - it's just made me feel even worse physically.

[kore]

OMG, I have found my people! I LOATHE crying. I always struggled against it in therapy. Crying is just about as bad as FEELINGS. No, worse.

I think that grieving is the process by which you go from a world which is absolutely unbearable and inconceivable to one that you can live with. "Acceptance" doesn't mean you like it, or think it's okay, or agree that this is how the world should be. It just means that you are here with it, and it is real, and you know that, deep down in your bones.

Radical acceptance. Yeah.

I did cry when Rachel Maddow was airing some tapes of health care workers who had self-interviewed. They all looked so young, so young, and so worn down to the bone, and like they knew they weren't going to get any kind of break at all. And like what they have seen will haunt them forever.