It’s Time to Start Crying in Public

Not long ago, I took a yoga class on a day when I had a lot going on.

The instructor was passionate, giving us motivational sidebars as we squatted and downward dogged, like “Self-love is our intention today” and “We often give so much to others without giving to ourselves.”

I enjoyed these affirmations, but didn’t take them too seriously. It wasn’t until shavasana that the pop-y “Love Myself” by Hailee Steinfeld started playing.

And that’s when it hit the fan.

Heat rose to my face, my eyes scrunched up, and before I could stop them, hot tears started falling down my face.

It was a full-blown emotional release of all the things I was going through at the time.

It was also an appreciation of the moment and the sentiment blaring over the portable speaker a foot from my head.

I wanted to lean into this. I wanted to feel this.

But laying in figure four on my mat amongst several other yogis and the instructor looming over us, my instinct was to be fearful of the emotion.

I tried to stop the tears by holding my breath, breathing deeply, distracting myself from the human thing that was happening inside of me.

Instead of feeling, I immediately began to suppress my emotions out of fear that the others in the room would find me weird or unstable. I worried that they would become uncomfortable with a display that fell outside of our standard social norms.

The thing is, if you cry in public, the general societal consensus is that you must have a darn good reason.

If you’re to put on an emotional display outside of what people know how to handle, making them uneasy, then it must be for some very big reason in order for you to be forgiven the cultural transgression.

Did someone die? Are you hurt? Did you lose your job? Someone break up with you?

None of these things had happened to me. I just allowed a real feeling, based on real things happening in my external and internal world, to surface in a personal moment where other people happened to be around.

How often, over the course of our lives, have we stuffed the bubbling of an emotion down deep inside of ourselves for no reason other than that it’s happening with others around?

How programmed are we to repeat this handling of feelings, from childhood through the rest of our lives?

Numerous scientific research studies have concluded that deregulated or suppressed emotions can cause harm to us psychologically and physiologically.

Doctors and clinicians abound recognize psychosomatic illnesses as a result of underlying thoughts and feelings.

Holistic wellness treatments, such as acupuncture and reiki, often point to improperly released and unprocessed emotions as a major source for mental and physical dis-ease.

And, yet, despite this knowledge within the scientific, clinician, and holistic wellness communities, we continue to stifle our collective feels within the firm grip of cultural expectation.

Part of this is attributed to how we’ve been taught to perceive emotions, especially ones that manifest in visible bodily reactions, such as tears.

Think of the time in grade school when some kid was hit with a wave of emotion and then subsequently bullied and taunted.

Think of all the times you heard a sibling, classmate or even a parent rebuke tears with the classic “stop being a cry baby!”

Crying is absolutely forbidden in workplaces, even though they are often environments of high stress and challenge and we spend roughly half of our waking hours there.

It’s even looked down upon to cry too much in situations that naturally evoke emotion, like weddings, funerals and celebrations.

Such is the way we have been taught to conduct ourselves and respond to others when it comes to tears.

There are drastic exceptions to this rule, filled with human compassion and warmth. But if acceptance and empathy were the normal reactions to emotions, would we be working as hard as we do to hide them from others?

No. We hide our feelings in shame because the conditioning we’ve received over the course of our lives, the things we have witnessed, make us fearful of that judgement the second the tears start to flow.

The truth is, we don’t know what to do with tears.

They open up a window into the most vulnerable parts of someone, and it makes us uncomfortable.

To address someone else’s tears means to make ourselves vulnerable. It means we must let down our own public persona and be more human.

It may even require us to feel our own feelings that we’ve been shoving into the back corners of ourselves for some time now.

This bottling of emotions is not healthy. We know this.

So why do we continue to demonize tears in our classrooms, workplaces, and public spaces? Why have we restricted the feeling of vulnerable emotion to the scarce times we are alone behind closed doors without any support or comfort?

What if I had just let myself cry in that yoga class? What if those around me had let it happen without judgement, perhaps even comforted me?

I imagine I would have felt the deep peace of having released something that wasn’t meant to stay bottled up.

Instead, the moment passed, and the feeling went back down unprocessed.

Displaying emotion is not weakness. It takes great strength to face and work through deep feelings like sadness, stress, grief, embarrassment, and exhaustion.

It’s high time we started accepting tears and recognizing emotional expression as a part of our human experience that we simply can’t physically or mentally afford to suppress.