Day 20: Tears
At 23 I hired a life coach.
In our first call together, he asked me about my goals. “If you could achieve only one thing from our time together, what would it be?”
I paused and thought about it. The silence lasted about 30 seconds. I had so many big dreams then. Money dreams. Career dreams. Status dreams.
I finally told him: “I just want to be able to cry.”
For over a year I had had the same recurring thought. If only I could cry, I would feel so much better.
Even though I was advancing in my career and was doing everything right, there was a pressure in me. I carried it with me everywhere. A weight on my shoulder. A tension that crept from my chest, up my neck, into my jaw and behind my eyes. It needed release. And every day it didn’t, it grew stronger.
I’d walk to and from work each day wishing the tears would well up once and for all. I’d sit in my room, breathing slow and shallow, waiting for tears. Please, just let me cry.
Before my three months with my coach were up, I did end up crying. I visited my family back home, and burst into tears at the airport as I said goodbye.
But it was another 18 months before I learned how to cry.
In my first acting class, a woman stood in front of the group exchanging simple lines with her partner — a man she’d never met. After going back and forth for two minutes, she began weeping.
I was reminded of what I’d told my coach. I still regularly felt the inner pressure and turmoil that made me wish I could cry.
But seeing her so easily moved to tears, I was confused. Surely she was special. Some rare breed of human uniquely suited to feel and express emotion. It must be genetics.
“I could never do that,” I assumed. Even though I wanted to.
But over the next several months of class, things inside of me began to shift. And one day, as I sat in the audience watching my classmates practice a scene, I felt a tear roll down my cheek — the first I’d felt in nearly two years.
I never cried in front of the class, but from then on I consistently came to tears as I watched the others.
What had changed?
It took me a while to understand, but I finally got it.
Whenever I was standing in front of the class, all I could feel was everyone’s eyes on me. I would grow tense and embarrassed and afraid. Everything I was feeling on the inside became trapped in a shell of rigid self-consciousness.
But when I was sitting on the sidelines, I was no longer self-conscious. I was able to turn my attention towards my classmates and focus on them completely. All of my senses were tuned to how they were feeling. Nothing about them escaped my attention. I was engrossed. With no attention on me, my guard was down. And the emotions I felt as I watched them were no longer trapped.
Sensitivity can be such a loaded word. But being in that class, I learned that sensitivity doesn’t need to mean weakness.
Sensitivity is simple. It’s simply our senses doing their job. It means being able to see, hear, smell, touch, taste — being able to sense.
The less sensitive we are, the less perceptive we are of what’s around us. It’s like being a dull instrument. A jammed scale. A faulty microphone. A dysfunctional compass that can’t pick up on the signals that usually help it point due north.
Through sensation, we collect data about ourselves, other people and the world. Sensitivity is how we learn. And if we learn something that makes us want to cry, that’s data too.