02/07/2024
Wednesday Blog Drop Preview:
I used to be a person who did not cry. People who don’t cry take great pride in their parched tear ducts as if the absence of appropriate emotional response is some Olympic accomplishment setting us apart from mere mortals, and not what it actually is: a sign of severe compartmentalization of feelings, likely the byproduct of a time where you felt very much the opposite of an Olympian – just a broken human who cried them all out, before getting up wiping the last one and deciding to get tough. Life hurts, suck it up. On we march toward the Gold metal of emotional stuffing. As I will discuss later, I now have very dewey tear ducts, but years ago, I was a much tougher cookie. Now, I am the soggy cookie bits that sink to the bottom of the glass of milk while watching subpar Netflix promos. But it took a long time to get there. I remember going through seasons where I knew I needed to cry, wanted to, and when alone, would even make awkward forced facial expressions trying to evoke them on demand – nothing. Those tear ducts had some seriously tight muscle memory back then.
This was reasonable; they had been trained under the zealous coach that is called being an adult child of an alcoholic. As far as alcoholic homes go, mine was pretty good. My father was not abusive, just absent. But what my home lacked in physical or verbal abuse, it made up with stress – a pulsing undercurrent of disease. I didn’t tell any of my friends my dad was an alcoholic. It wasn’t that my parents told me to keep it a secret; it was just not something I wanted known. Who would? So I would have friends over, my mom would make pink pancakes with chocolate chips, and I would pretend I had the family I wanted. A normal family. I have since learned these do not exist; there are just families with versions of “normal” that are more palatable than others. Every time a sleepover concluded at my house, it was another triumph of an Academy Award-winning performance of “Normal Crinean Life.” But getting to do sleepovers at the houses of friends who I thought had the real deal in terms of functional families was my favorite. It is a lot easier to keep up the cheery act outside the war zone....
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Uncategorized On the Fun Subject of Tears… how I hated them, begrudgingly learned to accept them, and now live peacefully with them (like the lady on top of this weird image). Crinean I used to be a person who did not cry. People who don’t cry take great pride in their parched tear ducts as if t...
