#44 - It Turns Out I Look Alarmingly Sad When I Cry

There’s plenty of little quirks that come from working through Zoom, and one of them is that when you’re sad and start crying to/at your sister/boss you get to find out exactly what you look like while you cry!

And it turns out I look sad. Like my eyes immediately give me away, I always thought I was controlling the shake in my voice but it turns out I’ve been completely unaware of how quickly they go red red and glassy and uh, yeah there’s literally no denying that the tears are a’coming (and probably quickly).

Then my face turns scarlet (no surprise there) and then the tears just go go go. And like, this week I’ve been crying a lot (though, not on Zoom) (for the most part) and it’s weird that I’m now just so aware of what my facial features are doing the whole time it’s happening. I don’t know that it’s a good thing that it’s so easy to observe ourselves, I really think we (like the human species ‘we’) weren’t ready for the internet, I can’t imagine that having the most remarkable cameras ever invented in the palm of our hands all the time is a good thing that’s really been helpful to the ongoing meteoric rise in body dysmorphia, y’know?

Anyway, I’m an easy crier. Quick to tears. Knowing myself and accepting myself has been a weirdly long journey, and accepting my damp ducts has been a big part of that. I used to wish I could turn it off, that I could hide more readily from exposing the very very soft and squishy underbelly that I have always maintained. I was a sensitive kid, a fact that was rediscovered year after year in all of my different schools (I have never seen the UNICEF psa videos in full because I was yanked out of the classroom within the first five minutes every. single. time. because my anguish upset my classmates).

Living in New York has been so fun for me because I’m never the center of attention. I know that no matter how embarrassing the thing I just did was (eating absolute shit slipping on ice in SoHo, falling down the stairs at Canal St, singing the entirety of There’s A Hole In The Bucket through the streets of Ridgewood while drunk) it is definitely not the weirdest thing anyone has seen that day. People mind their business in this city, and I love that for us.

It means that crying in public is a really valid response and one that few people will blink at. I’ve had two dudes respond to me crying actually—one was in the restaurant I was quitting after my manager was super fucking rude to me (he was a guest and wanted to make sure I was okay, truly what a human, still think of him fondly, hope he’s doing okay) and the other was a guy who gruffly told me “You look real pretty when you cry” before he continued on his way down Gates Ave (I was crying that time out of sheer frustration over an undelivered Christmas present that had my new phone in it that the USPS bounced back and forth between my local station and the one in Maspeth for two straight months before they finally returned-to-sender, what a TIME, and I was mostly crying because I had spent over two hours inside the USPS and in that time the McDonald’s across the street had stopped serving breakfast so all my “you can get through this there are hashbrowns waiting” dreams had been DASHED, what I would give for that to be my largest life problem these days, ah, my youth!). I don’t think of the second guy as fondly as the first, but I do appreciate the sentiment because having now witnessed myself cry, I uh, yeah pretty is not the first, fifth or even fifteenth word I would use!

The best places to cry in New York? Movie theatre lobbies. I have had several breakdowns in the W4th st AMC and lemme tell you, it’s air-conditioned in there, there are couches that are often empty, and people can always placate themselves by assuming you’re crying over whatever film you’ve just seen (no one asks, but I would hate to be a burden to strangers!). I’ve cried in several Starbucks but everyone hates it, makes it a ~thing, although shoutout to the guy who moved closer to my table though the one time I was begging my friend to leave their con-man boyfriend so that this dude could listen in better. Humans love gossip! Even men in no-mans-land Starbucks that are basically in TriBeCa while he was reading the WSJ and wearing Brooks Brothers (are they still considered fancy? Do we have a new bespoke suit for FiDi folk?).

Anyway, I cry a lot. I am a still fountain just waiting to be plugged in. I think that the tears have had the unintended consequence of making it hard for people to be honest with me, despite the fact that crying is so much part of my natural state that I actually have no expectation that my tears are causing any behavioral modifications by anyone witnessing them. I get more eloquent when I cry, which honestly, might be my absolute scariest trait. (That and responding with incredulous laughter and then dead silence when the situation feels like the other person was expecting me to explode. Honestly, there’s nothing that strikes fear faster into the hearts of those that love me than seeing me at a loss for words. It’s rare but when it happens…I think it’s haunting. That’s the vibe I get when people tell stories about it. It’s as if they survived a war. The Battle of The Time Claire Went Quiet.)

It’s rare that I break down in sobs from overwhelming sadness, I’m usually more of a frustrated cry kinda gal, but this week that’s been happening. A lot. I feel paralyzed by my heartache, I don’t know what to do but I keep telling myself that those in power only benefit from that feeling. I have to figure it out. I have to do the things that I can and add my voice to the collective power that is the majority. I want to do more, and demand change, and based on my conversations with people this week, I need to do more to talk about Citizens United and how it is more responsible than any other law for the rapid decline of this country.

The other side has no conscience. I don’t care if there are “good guys with guns” because I know that guns are bad. Get a new hobby, hunters! And for all of the people who will inevitably point out that some people hunt to feed themselves, I think we could do MORE as a SOCIETY to FIX THAT instead of using them as a straw man argument for why 18 year olds are within their rights to operate a gun with more power than any weapon in history??? Like, I believe in UBI more than I can even describe. There are no words for my love of unending government money. Because if we had UBI, if I wasn’t living paycheck-to-paycheck like almost every other American,  I would have TIME. Time to heal, time to plan, time to protest, time to activate, campaign, canvas. Time is our most precious resource and it feels like the entire country is having a manic response because we can’t slow down, we can’t not go to work, because we’re all one rent payment away from being evicted and it simply did not used to be this way, loves!!!!

We know what a human life is worth to Ted Cruz, because it’s less than whatever the sum of his NRA payments are! And also, just like, where’s the NRA getting all this money?? It’s also just absolutely wild that it’s not a conflict of interest that our reps actually get CASH PAYMENT from anyone outside of their taxpayer salary. Lobbying is so accepted and so unacceptable. Anyway, the NRA. They don’t have THAT many members, it’s not membership fees that are being used to line these politicians pockets. It’s not enough money to continuously bankroll the slaughter of Americans, but hey remember in 2018 when we arrested Maria Butina, an undisclosed Russian Foreign Agent who was like #2 in the NRA?? We know that Russia is playing the long game. That the Cold War never really ended. We know that! And we know that they intentionally sought to divide neighbors over issues like vaccines, Trump, covid responses, anything that they could make a polarized issue become one. “Russian bots” is not a phrase we should so easily dismiss. There were two facebook events, a protest and counter-protest, that were organized not by the people in the town they were being held, but some guy in Russia who wanted to sew malintent. And it worked! It worked so well!! Why would they bother to go nuclear when they can just force us to destroy ourselves while they quietly dismantle democracy in the background.

Is this a good time to continue to demand an explanation for why seven sitting US Senators spent July 4, 2018 meeting with Putin in Russia?

Why aren’t Democrats doing more? How dare they adjourn until June 6th. Why are we not on red alert about how many local election officials have been planted by the GOP (it won’t matter if we vote if they’ve made sure our vote won’t be counted, but honestly even saying that feels like I’m repeating a right wing talking point and like I cannot emphasize enough that everyone NEEDS TO VOTE and make sure you’re registered and know what the local elections on the ballot are for upcoming stuff! Make it a party, pour over the pamphlets with friends, go in groups to vote, ask every Tinder and Hinge date if they vote before you go home with them!!!!)? Why isn’t there a die-in in the Senate RIGHT NOW?? Why am I left to feel so helpless when I’ve elected the people who promised me they would do something?

Anyway, I wrote out my thoughts on Tuesday after I learned about the shooting because I was so horrified and I wasn’t sure what else to do but it felt like my unmitigated grief straight to everyone’s inbox was invasive. But if you’d like to read that, it’s here.

Follow the money. Follow the money! Hold these awful people who have dared to lie to us accountable. K*** Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate! According to Lindsey Graham, no one would convict you! (Chris Murphy ch*** Mitt Romney on C-Span challenge! I will stop calling for interpersonal violence now, soz.)

My heart remains broken, my tears are flowing, and becoming a cow avatar on Zoom was one of the best coping mechanisms I had this week (others include: old seasons of MTV’s The Challenge, long long long walks, writing, a mostly annoying video game called Windbound, my tiny fan that lives in my purse and makes it possible for me to leave my apartment when it’s over 80 degrees, and my friends and my sister, who have all once again reminded me that what we have is each other), and we can and will and must make it through this. Together.

I’m so glad I cry, I’m so glad I know how to express my frustrations and fears and hopes and this is messy, this is all very messy, and I’m grateful to everyone who reads, who listens, who holds space. It’s so hard right now to keep going, but we can and we will make it a better future. We simply have to. And it won’t be easy, but we all know it has to happen. We are the majority, we want background checks and gun control, there are more of us than there are of them. We can vote them out, we can protest en mass, and we can fight.

We just can’t give up. But we can cry while we make change!!