The Good in Crying
I’m sitting here in my comfy chair, reading stories on the internet. I have this weakness for those lists of stories from people you find on Facebook. The ones that are all “Haunted House worker share their weirdest experiences” or “Servers share the worst date they ever saw.” I don’t know what it is about them, but I really enjoy reading through them. So I’m reading through one that’s married people telling the moment they knew their spouse was the one, and it’s very emotional in places, and I’ve cried like three times already. And it got me thinking about how sometimes you just need a good cry.
Do you know how that feels? If you’re female you probably do. Not all girls are like this, of course, and some guys are. My best friend doesn’t cry at movies. We watched P.S. I Love You, and I cried like a baby through the whole thing and she was completely dry-eyed and fine. To be fair, I also cry at everything, books, movies, songs, billboards, you name it. Sometimes that’s just what you need, you know? I routinely will seek out things that make me cry online because I just need a good cry. I highly recommend it, it’s very cathartic.
I am a big believer in letting out your emotions. I think it might be one of the reasons I tend to way overshare everything. I realize that not everything needs to be shared, but if I get excited, or concerned or stressed or angry it just sort of spills out. I’m also highly empathetic. When I see crying I want to cry too. The ending to Inside Out is super rough on me. My wonderful husband always looks at me and asks if I’m okay as I hide in my blanket as much as possible to avoid crying in front of everyone. But it’s fine, embarrassing as I sit in a room full of people who aren’t spewing emotion, but fine, nonetheless. It’s exhausting and I feel drained afterward, but it’s a cleansing kind of drained, you know? Like being rinsed out on the inside.
My favorite cries are the ones induced by something beautiful. I like to read heart-warming stories about people doing selfless acts for others, people who brightened someone’s day out of the kindness of their hearts and turned their life around. I love those ones most because that’s where I see God most prominently, in how He provides for people through others. How he sends a struggling mom a kind stranger to pay for her meal or bag her groceries while she deals with a screaming child. How He gives comfort to an older man through the friendship of a little girl. How He blesses people by His grace in ways that seem so simple to us, but mean the world to the recipient. I like to seek out those stories when I find that I’d like to have a good cry, because they wash my soul out and make my heart happy at the same time.
So today I did some happy crying and it felt really good, despite my asking my cats why I constantly do this to myself. I know very well why I keep going back to things that make me cry. It’s not as masochistic as it might at first seem. If you’ve never given it a try, I’d highly recommend it. There is some good in crying, after all.
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