Steve - Cries

If you've spent a fair amount of time talking to me, I've probably told you about my relationship with tears. That is, I don't really have one. I tell people I haven't cried since I was 13 years old. It's one of those truths that is true, but isn't technically true. Here is why:

• I vividly remember the last time I really cried. It was during a long period of what I can only describe as bullying at the hands of my family. My siblings, both younger, went through a period of ganging up on me. I generally just stood and took it, because various events in my childhood had lead to me dealing with abuse in this way. One time, though, my brother started hitting me with a belt. This, I thought, was a reasonable point to start using reasonable force to get him to stop. So I did, and it stopped, and no one got hurt. However, they told the parents, and mother got very angry. Physical violence was never okay, but mental violence was essentially allowed. Thus, the apathy she had showed towards my asking for a bit of help with this pretty destructive conflict between me and my siblings disappeared when I inevitably brought force into it. I was very upset, and I cried quite a lot. Needless to say, my parents displayed the same apathy towards my upset as before. I think I was fourteen at this point.


• I just remembered, that wasn't the last time either. The last time was when I broke up with my girlfriend at 15. Four years ago. I don't count this one though, because... I don't know. I want to say a longer period of time, because that's how it feels. More on this later.


• When I say cry, I mean really cry. Anything that involves sobbing, shaking, all that. I tear up at films, and when I'm under a lot of pressure, and even that is rare (I think I've shed two tears max since the beginning of 2008), but that's always been me either trying really hard to cry or vicariously, at films/books/etc. I'm posting this entry because today I teared up quite a lot at a film. Good Bye Lenin, which isn't a sad film, not really, but I don't know... it's beautiful.

I tell people this, about my lack of crying, and I nearly always get a kind of low-level envy. Like they'd rather not cry. People are ashamed of it, embarrassed by it, and most people seem to try to stop it. I wish I could cry, I try to and fail. I forgot how. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I learned to separate my emotions from my outer appearance. I was given systematic lessons in controlling my temper in primary school, through being taunted verbally until I lost it, and then getting punished when I did, I learned that channelling anger straight through to my limbs never helped. I was given the standard masculinity socialisation which teaches you to suppress your emotions anyway. I was given a hard time about being bisexual around the ages 12-14, which reinforced the lessons of controlling emotions I'd been taught previously. All this with the lessons in pacifism from my mother.

It's all brought me to this stage, where I am essentially unable to express what I feel through my behaviour or appearance. I've felt awful all of this year, and no one has noticed without me explicitly telling them (and they register considerable surprise when I do). Physical expression was torn out of me, and with it went my spontaneity and my ability to live in the present moment. My lack of skill at visual art and driving both stem, I think, from my inability to concentrate on the present. Conversations with close friends are generally mostly silence. I say very little, and listen a lot. On one level this is good, because people like to be listened to, but on another it means I'm mostly existing in my own thoughts.

And people envy me for this. It upsets me when they do. They don't know what a gift and opportunity they have.

I don't really know how to 'fix' it. Existing like this means that I can mostly edit myself pretty easily. But what if that control is the thing I am trying to remove? I'm not sure I want to either, not sure what I'd do in absence of it. I know there are ways of existing beyond it, through it, for times, but it's remembering to do it that's the problem. It has to become a habit. Taking risks and existing on some kind of edge. living with mortality and with almost a desire for failure.

I don't know. I've lost coherence. I think something in me is changing. I cried more for less reason today than I have in a long time, and to have such emotional potential within me is something I don't have very often at all. I will take risks, this Easter break, if only for their own sake.