Talking About Tears 🌧☔️
This week, I talk about tears in their different forms and what it all means.
{I found this in my drafts and haven’t re-read it since first writing it so, perhaps, have some unfiltered and unedited words!}
I’ve burst into tears in loads of odd places.
But this weekend, a wave of something hit me when I was going through ~*the cutlery drawer*~ to get the bottle opener. When I found it, instead of just opening my drink, my reward was globs of tears running down my face, and into the drawer. The strangest thing about the encounter was that I was more upset about the splats of tears that got into the drawer than I was about actually crying.
Was I upset for being upset? I don’t know. But I was definitely upset about the mess my tears were making all over the kitchen.
Another crying adventure that sticks with me is when I did the most diva-thing possible and used my sunglasses to cover the flowing tears on an impossibly overcast, grey day. It was a day that needed no sunglasses and held no reason for them to be in my jacket, but there they were, needlessly accompanying me on my journey until they came to be very useful - just not so much for the flow of tears that fell below the sunglasses rim and had to be windscreen-wipered away with my hands or my sleeves or my fingers or, even my jacket’s shoulder as the other pieces of me became too damp to provide any use. And, it’s days like these when everyone seems to be about, saying hello to you, and you worry if you open your mouth to say hello back you think some tears might just fall out from there, too.
I’d chosen a churchyard as my destination that day. I’d sat on a bench tucked up against the base of the church, enough out of the way, but still close enough. The vicar arrived, said hello to me, and bustled through the doors. A man and his dog came by and said hello too, and then another dog and companion. But, even when no human was nearby, the birds carried on shouting their songs above me from tree to tree. A particularly spicy motorbike came to a junction and revved more than I thought - or hoped - was possible. For the most part, though, it really was peaceful. It was a poetic setting to do some light-to-medium crying.
Then, for two years, I cried on stage two-to-three times a day, five days a week, and that gave me a different kind of feeling. Not one of embarrassment or of disappointment, but of pride. I loved being the actor that could cry on cue. I loved being the actor people came up to after the show to ask “were they real tears?”, and for me to say, “yes”. I loved making other people cry as a result of my crying. And I’m not sure what that says about me, or if I’ve ever really thought about it before.
I was touring a play with a really nasty plot. At the end of the show, I was left alone on stage while Gabrielle Aplin’s version of The Power of Love played out of our clunky and sometimes unpredictable PA, and the stage direction was to cry. After we’d packed up and I’d dried my face off, we’d leave for another venue to set up and do it all over again. And then, after that one, we might have a few hours’ rest before doing it all over again.
Sometimes when I cry into… misguided places like the cutlery drawer, I think I’m slipping into the trope from films. You know, the one where they wipe away the tears, and paint a smile and say everything’s fine. But then I remember this is my life so maybe that relation shouldn’t be made or felt, particularly when I can’t bring myself to say that things are fine and shiny when sometimes they’re far from that.
Ps - hi! Hello! I’m Lucy. Since June 2020 I’ve been running LucyWrites, my content writing company, after remote working taught us all that freelancers don’t need to be in the office with someone to get their company’s ~~ViBe~~.
I like to use my lived experience to connect with others through my writing, and have written for HuffPost, Metro.co.uk, Reader's Digest and Stylist on both mental and physical health, to silly things about changing rooms and getting obsessed with my fitness tracker.
Making my hobby my career has meant my creative writing has taken a backseat over the past few years - so things i tell my cat will be my new space for musings. I’m so happy to have you here. 🐱
Now I feel validated!