Permission to Cry

Listening to the body

I am not a skilled juggler. I am more of a teeter-totterer. I invest my energies lopsidedly into one thing or another. The fall and winter have been a prolific time for my private songwriting practice. Not so much for my public newsletter practice. I feel a bit like a dog with its tail in between its legs over returning to crafts I have neglected. But I suppose that this stray part of me deserves a pet and an ear rub. Good job coming back, you. I missed you. I’d like to see you come around more often.

There is another thing that I have been working on in the last half year. And that is simply being in my body. I’m a heady creature. I live much of my life in story mode. There is a strong inner monologue in this one. This is great for creativity (and also for inventing anxiety and having imaginary fights with people). It is not so great for experiencing the present moment.

After diving into somatic exercises with my therapist in the last couple of years, it has become disturbingly obvious that I’m not particularly aware of my body’s existence. This is how my therapy sessions go: I plant myself on the gray West-Elm couch, stare at the knick knacks on the coffee table in front of me (the fidget spinner, the rubix cube, the jar of pens) and I ramble and cry about whatever is currently vexing me, and my therapist asks me “Where do you feel that in your body?” And I say “Can you rephrase the question?” And she says “What feelings do you notice in your body?” And then I stare at her blankly, and she smiles very sweetly at me like we are sharing a secret, and she says, “Maybe you could notice the feeling of your thighs on the couch and your feet on the floor.” And if I close my eyes and focus impossibly hard, I can feel them just barely there, under the blare of trumpeting, overlapping streams of thought. There are my legs.

To more bodily creatures, maybe this sounds funny. But I suspect there are a lot of us out there, not feeling our bodies. Those of us who learned from a young age that bodies are dangerous, unsafe, chaotic. That in order to be good, we must keep our bodies contained, to keep them quiet. To keep them from needing. 

As a child, I constantly observed my classmates wiggling their bodies in their seats, talking over the teacher, disrupting class, and getting sent to the principal’s office. I watched them in silent judgment, a stoic mini adult in a child’s body, tsk’ing to myself. How very Virgo of me. I wish I could go back in time and learn from these rebels. Explain to me how you stay in your body. Tell me how not to value obedience above all else. Teach me how to be impervious to consequence!

So this is what I’m working on. Trying to stay in my body. Trying to feel things and not immediately intellectualize them. I’m allowing myself to cry. I think, “Is it normal to cry this much?” (As if there is some predetermined amount of acceptable crying. As if crying isn’t one of the least harmful, most natural ways to release a build up of emotions.) I’m spending more time with friends. I’m exercising more, for enjoyment, not punishment. I am noticing what my body feels when I do these things. The sensation of laughter bubbling up. The burning of my hamstrings in pyramid pose. I have been repairing my relationship with motion. My relationships with wanting, with feeling, with having needs. 

I believe I could go my whole life getting better and better at resisting emotion. I think I could become an Olympic level pain-avoider. Inside of me, there is a switch that some unconscious part of me, some phantom hand reaches out and flips to “off” when the feelings get too hot. Disconnect. Disengage. I start making plans. I tell myself I don’t need anybody. I can get a plane ticket to Barcelona, I can start a new life. I can get an apartment with a balcony where I can play guitar to my plants and watch the people walking down Las Ramblas in the sunshine. 

This panic fantasy is rooted in past experience. A million years ago, in December 2014, I broke up with my boyfriend and quit my job so that I could pursue music full time. Then my friend and I took a trip to Costa Rica, and another to Europe. It was a lot of change all at once. I was blissful. I felt so in control of my own destiny. For a little while. Until the fantasy lost its shine. Until I came back to the US, after spending all my money traveling, and struggled to make rent. Until the band started touring for weeks at a time, spending long hours in the band van, driving to play empty rooms in rural states, giving me ample time to ruminate and feel sorry for myself. The parts of myself I was running from caught up to me eventually.

On top of the world in Barcelona with Emilee in 2015.

These are the kind of life moves Hollywood teaches us to make. Decimate everything and start over. (I am embarrassed about how much Hollywood influenced me as a young person, but the internet was undeveloped back then, and extremely slow.) The thing about stories is that they are driven by conflict. The protagonist makes decisions that lead to more conflict until eventually there is a climactic event and resolution. I am not seeking novel-worthy climactic events in my life anymore. I have lived through enough of those. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what trauma is, and humans do not handle trauma like story characters do. So I’m in my peace-seeking phase. I am seeking stability. I am seeking relationships full of healthy communication and conflict resolution. Which means I have to participate in communicating. I have to admit to pain. 

I am working to heal. I have so many stories I want to tell. I think they are a part of my healing. But I’m going to go slow. I will probably keep disappearing and reappearing. I might share too much or not enough, or jumble my thoughts or write things that embarrass me later. I’m probably never going to be dedicated to writing a weekly newsletter. I might one day delete my entire Substack. Who knows what the future holds.

I’ve been inspired by the writing of Marlee Grace and Nic Antoinette. I believe that if I can keep showing up, one day I might say something that resonates with somebody else the way that their words do for me. It is a soothing balm to remember we are not alone. Maybe I can find my fellow pain-avoiders and we can keep reminding each other it’s ok to feel. That we are allowed to want to run and maybe that means we should actually, literally, go for a run or walk and see how we feel when we’ve given the energy a chance to move through our bodies, rather than holding it inside. And if we’re not up for that, maybe we can flail our limbs, or learn how to twerk, or scribble on paper, or scream in our cars, or throw some axes, or take a kickboxing class, or chop some vegetables. Or cry. 

If you need it, I give you permission to cry. However much you are crying is the normal amount. It is the required amount for the human experience you are having.