Raise your hands if you cry tears of joy at commercials that show soldiers coming home from war. Or when you see people perform good deeds, and when the underdog wins? Raise them if you have tears of sadness when people die in movies, when you see images of people or animals suffering, and when you get a glimpse of just how evil people can be. I’m an emotional person with a lot of feelings. I tend to absorb whatever emotions are around me. This all causes me to feel intense and extreme emotions.
When I was a kid, having too many emotions was considered a bad thing. Crying was definitely unacceptable, even when justified. If we were hit, we were told to stop crying or they would hit us harder. Once when I was crying because my dad wasn’t going to see me on my birthday, my friend told me that crying was bad for me and to stop. She told me that her parents had told her that crying wasn’t good for you health wise. It’s funny I was watching my family’s reunion video two years before I was born and in the video you hear one of my aunts telling my cousin, “Go away, cry baby. Get out of here,” because he was crying. In her defense in the video it sounded more like him whining, but still, I haven’t heard an adult call a child a cry baby since my childhood. Nowadays, kids in tears are scooped up by their parents who tell them it’s going to be okay.
Presently, I still have moments of shame when I cry or feel too much. I try to hide it, or shrug it off to someone who might see, saying repeatedly, “I’m not crying.” My boyfriend has unfortunately had to see me cry through commercials, movies, horrible events, etc, and he seems to enjoy when I show this type of emotion. Probably because a majority of the time, I show him my strong and funny side. So, these minor breakdowns make me appear more human. He is very open with showing me a lot of his emotions, so sharing emotions with him, is important to him.
People at work and friends tell me they can’t picture me crying. It’s rare that I cry in front of people, so it’s understandable they can’t picture me crying. However, when I insist that I cry quite frequently, their usual response is along the lines of, “I don’t know, you just seem really strong and I can’t picture you crying,” or “You just seem to make jokes all the time, even in tough situations. I can’t see you showing an emotional side like that.”
I just laugh. It’s nice to feel like people think you’re some super human who doesn’t feel sadness enough to cry or show what would usually be defined as weakness. I think I’ve put forth this image on purpose because that is exactly what I want people to think of me. To describe me as some strong individual who has it all together and can get through anything. However, I am not always all these things, and putting forth this image has had many negative outcomes. One being that, people never know the real me. Another being that people think you are in some way better than them or they think you believe you are better than them.
A long time ago, one of my best friends and I got into an argument. It was one of my first adult arguments with a friend and something she said stuck with me and changed my perspective on how I wanted others to view me. She said to me and I’m paraphrasing here, “You think you’re so stoic and better than everyone else. You’re not. You judge everyone else who doesn’t have their life together and you act holier than though…” We’re friends now of course, and I tell her how right she was when she said that. She was right, I did try to act like I had my life together. As if I always diligently tried to make the right and best decisions. I did judge everyone who I felt could’ve been doing more with their lives and I still have a lot of judgments now. As much as I come off as having it “together,” I don’t. I need a lot of help in almost every aspect of my life. I’ve got issues like everyone else and I realized a lot of people didn’t know or think this because I withheld truths about myself from them. When I had hard times, I kept them to myself or acted like they didn’t phase me, when they did. I avoided sharing things and this kept everyone in the dark as to what was going on with me. It was maybe over a year ago I started opening up about real things I went through and was going through, in this blog. When people started reading it that knew me, they would send me texts/emails, telling me they had no idea about a lot the stuff I was blogging about. I started to let people in. It felt nice to have people out there who knew the parts of me I had been so reluctant to share. Moving forward, my therapist is challenging me to express my feelings more with friends and family. She thinks it could be good for my emotional health. We’ve decided that my outbursts of emotions could be lessened by merely expressing myself more with others. Bottling it all up can lead to more intense breakdowns, so we’ve worked on getting to the root of the issue.
In therapy, I discovered that I tend to avoid people who challenge me. Now, don’t get me wrong, my friends and family challenge me in many ways, but I mean in a more critical way. I’m so fortunate to have so many people in my life who are supportive and loving. However, I have noticed I get defensive and incredibly upset when I am criticized. I believe this is because I’m not used to it anymore. In college, that’s all there was, constant critique with a little bit of praise. Nowadays, I’m covered in praise and support and lacking in the criticism. Now you might think I’m some masochist who loves being called a failure, but that’s not necessarily what I’m talking about. It’s that whole “tough skin” routine that you always hear about in older movies or remember from your childhood. A father/mother will yell out to their child, “You’re too soft. You gotta toughen up.” Well, that’s what I need a little bit of, because lord knows when my mother criticizes me, whether it’s accurate or not, I fall apart like overcooked potatoes. With that said, I need to rebuild communication and put myself in situations with people who are hard on me in a positive manner. I’m not going to obviously hang out with people who tell me I should lose 40 pounds because I’m fat, but instead email that one writer friend I have that is always questioning all that I do (love you, man, you know who you are). He has a tendency of making me feel like I should be doing more with my life, mostly because he is. I’m already pretty tough on myself, but I also am quick to defend myself. Here’s an example, “Geez, Estela, you didn’t do yoga today, it’s only an hour, why did you have to watch the season finale of “Master of None” (Please watch the second season of this show, it is fantastic, still no regrets but it could have waited)? Then my defense will respond, “You had a busy day, you were running errands, studying, and setting up your mom’s printer. You can skip one day of yoga, you did exercise when you walked your dogs around the block! Atta girl.”
See my dilemma?
Anyway, that’s my homework assignment from therapy: to put myself in more challenging and vulnerable situations more often.
Criticism is healthy when it’s constructive and challenging. I’ve realized I need a lot of this in my life. Now, I just have to be brave enough to reach out for it and learn from it.
WRITTEN BY: Estela
GIRL. 20-Something. 