good morning!
anyways this post is about whether crying makes me feel good or bad. one would superficially think that crying is a “bad” thing, because that’s how we’ve always been taught as a kid. “oh no, look you made them / her / him cry. you can’t do that kind of stuff”. so crying has a bad association.
yet like i keep saying, (human) life needs both laughter and crying, just like plants need both sunshine and rainfall.¹ And even when i feel like shaking from the emotions; i still recognize that this is what life is supposed to be all about; having all the emotions, including the “bad” ones. it’s just in our modern times that we’ve saught an imbalance in things, but that’s neither sustainable nor right.
idk whether you can understand these thoughts; but they came to me while i contemplated whether i should post “i can cry again” into the trans_joy community. is it “joy”? i would say yes, but a deeper, less superficial type of joy than when one’s laughing. it’s not so much a superficial expression of joy, but a deeper feeling that things are right.
unrelated stuff about the german language
[1]: the german phrase is “Sonnenschein und Regen”, it’s a beautiful phrase. i’m saying this because i kinda think that while people enjoy shitting on the german language a lot (deservedly) for all its Artikel and grammatical complexity, some phrases and words are actually outright beautiful, and this is one of them.
Oh my god yes, it’s like I was cut off from an entire realm of emotional and bodily understanding. I felt these emotions the entire time (and worse), but there was no way of externalizing them.
Oh yes, the “boys don’t cry” notion of patriarchy. Men who always get angry instead of sad are often powertripping or violent but mostvof them are victims of the system, in a way…
I’m sorry you had to feel the system treating you as a man and imposing such limits but I’m glad you found your solution.
I don’t even know if it was the gendered element of crying. Certainly that was an element, but I’ve never really wanted or cared about appearing masculine enough beyond like, understanding I’d be punished for defying those norms. The way we teach and allow men to defend themselves often also forces them to use aggression and anger, or they’ll be left to defend themselves from other men who take gentleness as weakness, and are always anxious about their position in the hierarchy. Unfortunately, even if you live in a place that allows some marginal deviation from those gendered norms, most men are kind of stuck with other men, and if you don’t get along with them (as many trans women obviously don’t), you’re defending yourself a lot. So, it’s also just a survival coping mechanism to use anger over sadness when these are emotions that are so often interlinked and cooperative.
I honestly have just always had a hard time crying, even when I wanted to. I mentioned it elsewhere on this thread, but it felt like there was a literal block in my eyes that kept me from doing it. Being trans just also makes you have to clamp up a lot, and maybe there’s a psychosomatic element in how much relief you can safely indulge in before you’re in danger. I don’t want to discount the gendered socialization by any means, I know we all have to suffer through untangling that from ourselves, but it is always tough to tell if I had internalized a behaviour, or adopted one to secure my own sense of identity (like not getting along with men because I refused to be like them, and did not let them behave the way they all let each other behave).