Just because I’m crying doesn’t mean I’m sad

And other observations from the frontline of emotions

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

CRYING

‘Oh no, why are you crying now?’ asked my husband as he opened the door to our shared office.

I looked up, caught red-handed hunched over my phone with tears streaming down my cheeks.

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, a garbled reply through sniffs and sobs.

His forehead furrowed. 

‘It’s just a video on the internet.’

‘Ah.’ His eyebrows relaxed. 

‘A bullied boy whose grandma died and then he got a puppy.’

‘Right…’

My husband opened his laptop and began organising the books on his desk. There was little more to say. He was used to discovering me in this state. If I wasn’t crying over a bullied boy and his puppy, it was an elephant freed from its chains in a logging factory. Or a Maori man whose father had died and his American friends had learnt the haka to honour him. Or a 98-year-old Irish woman telling a street photographer she wished she wasn’t alone at Christmas. Or a teen student graduating high school while her supportive teacher held her baby. Or a baby wearing glasses for the first time. Or a toddler befriending a crow. Or any footage of Robin Williams.

A relentless stream of videos available online to reduce me to tears. 

My guilty little secret of extreme sentimentality. 

I feel simultaneously ashamed about the regularity of this crying while thinking there’s something healthy about it, too. The other week I told my sister I thought it was good to cry at least once a day watching these videos. That it helped unleash my pent-up emotions and level things out. 

‘OK then,’ she said, giving me a look that told me she thought this was possibly not quite normal.

It all started with an account I didn’t follow called The Dodo, which showed videos of mistreated dogs rescued by saintly people – dogs that were soon bounding around, tongues hanging out, living their best lives. I’m not a ‘dog person’, I’ve never even had a proper pet. But a video appeared on my feed one day and the more I found myself compelled to watch these sad dogs, the more their number multiplied; video after video of humanity’s worst treatment of animals – then its best. 

Since then, there’s little I won’t entertain for an emotional spiral (for example, I am completely disinterested in football, but watching Ian Wright meet his old teacher Mr Pigden is one of the greatest tearjerkers of all time). Though I can’t face anything truly sad about children. And I’ve got no patience for videos of people who like to film themselves crying. I know I should be more sympathetic but I’m too cynical to watch those. It seems so fake. Or maybe it’s ultimately too real – a mirror I’d rather not glance into.

Because real life is too much. The real news is awful. It never has the redemptive arc these videos have. In real life, the lonely stay lonely. The anguished grow more pained. Buildings are bombed. Children are killed. Women are raped and murdered. The planet boils and floods and cracks beneath our feet. It is a wonder we’re not all crying more, all day long. No wonder we medicate with ‘safer’ stories all neatly packaged up with stirring soundtrack. How much easier it feels to move onwards.

RESTING

This morning I arrived at a day between deadlines without urgent tasks or childcare. A fresh day to work on new writing projects and be creative – a day I’ve longed for after an intense few months. But when the children went to nursery and school, I crawled back under the duvet. I stayed there two more hours – my mind flailing; my body so heavy, I dreamed I was made of stone. An immovable lump. 

Maybe this was bed rot, or goblin mode or whatever it is that Gen Z calls it. Possibly ‘self-care’, if I was being millennial. But I called this ‘guiltily lying in bed’. I called this ‘failure to get up and be productive’. 

Eventually, I opened a book and read for an hour. Oscar Wilde might have called this decadence. Actually, Oscar Wilde would not have trifled himself with overthinking the notion of lying in bed for an hour reading as if that were some barbaric act, rather than one of life’s greatest joys. 

The book I was reading was All Fours by Miranda July – an astonishing novel that features, without giving too much away, a woman having some kind of perimenopausal life crisis. A meta experience as I too have been wondering lately if I am approaching my own perimenopausal era. (I look forward to Taylor Swift’s tour on this subject in twenty years.)

I've begun talking about it with anyone who will engage. 

‘I was looking it up,’ replied an old friend last week. ‘The range of symptoms is nuts.’

Did perimenopause include, I wondered, crying endlessly at videos on the internet?

Meanwhile: ‘No, no, don’t talk about perimenopause,’ said another friend. ‘We’re not that old.’

‘But we are. Peri is coming,’ I said, like it was the season finale of our lives. (Game of Hormones?)

Then I opened my period tracker app. Oh. Two days til my next period. Maybe this was just bog-standard PMS gloom, not the peri. Or maybe it was both. PMS-squared. A oestrogen-compromised double-whammy making me weep.

Or maybe all these feelings were actually just a consequence of parenthood. I swear I used to have more emotional resilience, but it’s all been downhill since I had children – the birth of my oldest son five years ago opening up a psychic portal that never quite closed. It’s as though a hormonal breach occurred – my emotions have remained closer to the surface ever since, ready to spill out with the slightest invitation. 

Or perhaps it’s as simple as this: the stakes of life have got higher. As my youth absconded, so did my nihilism. I care more – about everything. About this one life and especially the people in it. I care til my chest feels tight. Ruminating, worrying and wondering what more can be done. Because everyone is precious, even the humans I don’t yet know.

Maybe that’s why I cry over strangers on the internet.

HOPING

A few days after Trump won the US election, I saw this quote shared on Instagram:

‘People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.’

It spoke to me, but then, I was already in a combative mood. Activists, while permitting an interlude for mourning, had immediately sounded the battle cry. The fight back had begun. Believing in ‘better’ required action – not just passively hoping. It was time to get dirt on your face. 

Despite being across the pond, I felt ready. And yet, even on the cusp of a revolution, I found myself prone to procrastination. I wanted to share that quote with you to rouse your spirits as much as I had felt it rouse mine, but my journalistic instincts told me I needed to fact-check a few details first. Who wrote it? What was the context? What if the person who said it was actually a Bad Person? What if they worshipped aliens and Andrew Tate?

I ventured cautiously onto X aka Twitter to find the quote, which someone called @CrowsFault aka Matthew had written more than two years ago. Scrolling through old Tweets, I discovered Matthew’s surprise at how this ‘random thought’ of his had gone viral. Which was, he said, a counter to apathy – a comment to those who say ‘nothing you do matters, that you should just stop fighting back, that you can’t win.’

I found myself nodding again. Of course, most people will know that feeling – that fear that nothing you do matters – even if it ebbs and flows. It’s an anxiety that lingers in the ether of our human experience. It’s there as we diligently recycle our paper and plastic while climate change causes storms to swallow cities whole. It’s there in grief and loss, missed opportunities and broken hearts. What can we really do, we might wonder on darker days. How can I truly affect anything?

And yet, each day, we – like Hope spitting out another tooth – rise for another go.

Because the fact is, we can.

When my husband discovered me crying over my phone, he ignored my tears. Not because he’s callous, but because he knew I wasn’t actually sad. I was simply feeling. 

I’m not addicted to sentimentality, and I’m certainly not enamoured by my own tears – but I do crave kindness. I micro-dose on it daily, searching out hit after hit of humanity doing good things.

Because what is kindness if not the fuel of hope? More than that, kindness is hope in action. Kindness is the soft fight. It pushes us forward, together.

Seeing acts of kindness reassures me that we have it within us to be OK. The world feels scary right now. And social media can agitate our fears, but get the algorithms right and you’ll see good too. There is a flipside to the inhumanity out there – glimmers beneath the rubble. There is our humanity. Our concern for one another. Our belief in equality and love and safety. We must cling to it – a life raft through these tempestuous times.

So maybe that’s why I cry over videos on the internet.

And because, it turns out, I am actually a dog person after all. Though my own rescue story will probably have to wait a few more years.

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Postscript: APOLOGISING

There is an elephant in the room. And I am the elephant. 

There is a chance you are reading this and wondering who the hell I am. Wondering ‘What is this newsletter?’, with no memory of subscribing. And all I can say is, I’m sorry. Because I’ve been absent on Substack for a good few months with no explanation or apology. Until now. But I really am sorry. So sorry that I didn’t even know how to write this post. If you go quiet on Substack, you want to return with official Great Wisdoms. But all I have returned with are more questions to ask, more mess to share. Parenting, motherhood, raising boys, being a woman, growing older, maintaining relationships, struggling with the state of the world… well, it never gets easier, even if some of the challenges have become more familiar. 

Maybe though, if you have got this far, you’ve decided to stick with me a little longer. Maybe we can discuss all these things together.

Maybe you can tell me how you are doing too. How you are moving onwards in this strange old world.

I’ve missed you, if that doesn’t sound too forward.

Thank you for reading.