In order to become a functioning human, I had to learn how to cry. Historically, I’ve really only cried at unexpected times, such as when a cartoon dinosaur loses its mother or when I accidentally step on my real animal’s paw. I’m also no stranger to shedding a tear or two when I hear “I’ll Be Missing You” by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans. I think his name is Diddy now, but who knows what his name will be when this book is released, and I don’t have time to keep up with his indecisive nomenclature. The point is, the song makes me emotional, so if it comes on in a public place, I literally have to excuse myself to have a wistful sob in a bathroom. Maybe because it makes me nostalgic for when I was a teenager, back when I wanted to escape reality and couldn’t wait to finally be an adult. This was of course before I realized that most of adult life is spent on the phone with customer service, making up lies to get out of plans, and thinking every ingrown hair is an STD. Regardless, I had a sort of emotional dyslexia when it came to releasing sadness; often when I heard terrible news, I would laugh hysterically, and when a jovial pop song would come on at the gym, I’d erupt in sobs. Dude, something was up in terms of my relationship to expressing healthy emotion.
My friend told me about this thing where you go sit with a woman who makes you cry out all the old repressed grief you carry around with you. This practice is called the Grinberg Method, and when I looked it up on Wikipedia I found this definition: “Practicing the methodology is intended to teach people to gain control and stop trying to avoid the pain, to be fully attentive to their body and experience of it. When this occurs, energy is freed to deal with the pain and related sensations, giving the body an opportunity to mend and heal.” The woman I was meeting was named Evelyn. I know, already intimidating. When I went to her office, it took me a little while to find the front door. I always wonder if healers and therapists get offices in hard-to-find places on purpose to make sure you’re as stressed out as possible when you arrive, so by the end of the session, when you’ve finally calmed down, they can be like, “See? My therapy is working! You were so stressed out when you walked in!” when in reality the biggest problem in your life is finding parking at your therapist’s office. Evelyn had an office with a keypad entry system, and I struggled with punching in the numbers because if I’m over a minute late to something, I panic and my frontal lobe shuts down. After I frantically hacked at the keypad as if a bomb would go off and destroy Earth if I didn’t get the code right in time, Evelyn opened the door from the inside. Even though I had an appointment, guilt and shame washed over me because I felt I interrupted whatever she was doing.
Evelyn’s vibe is arresting to say the least. She has an inexplicable energy that’s calming but also creepy at first because she doesn’t mirror or entertain the behavior around her. It’s like she’s got this invisible orb shield thing around her that deflects people’s needy energy. No matter how much toxicity you throw at her, it just bounces off, then hits you in the face, sort of like when you spit gum out of a moving car and then it gets stuck in your hair. And no, she’s not on muscle relaxants. I asked. She had laugh lines on her face, but almost no forehead lines, which told the story that she smiled a lot but didn’t stress out. Or maybe she had Botox, but I don’t think so.
Evelyn looked like she slept eight hours a night, and I’ll pay for advice from anyone who has figured out how to do that. She didn’t talk much, which is very triggering for insecure people like me. Silence makes me so uncomfortable that it usually causes me to launch into a vagina monologue of jokes, apologies, and excuses for my existence. Most of us, without realizing it, are in a constant state of apology. I once tried to go twenty-four hours without apologizing and I lasted thirty minutes, basically as long as it took to encounter another human. I said to a receptionist, “Sorry I’m early.” Early.
Evelyn truly doesn’t give a shit if people like her or not, which of course makes everyone like her. Evelyn speaks only when she needs to and doesn’t fill silences with nervous, insecure drivel the way a lot of us do when we need the approval of others. Her self-assured silence of course made me think she was mad at me, which is ridiculous, since she didn’t even know me. When someone isn’t talking, my brain tends to fill in the blanks with how I feel about myself, so I made the assumption that she was disappointed in me and I did what I do best: apologized when I had done nothing wrong. When I apologized to Evelyn, she looked deeply confused. After hearing my hemorrhaging litany of apologies, she made eye contact with me and sincerely asked, “Why?”
I immediately burst into tears.
Then, like any child conditioned to “calm down” and “stop crying,” I felt the muscles in my face automatically clench up to stop the tears from coming. She looked even more confused.
“Why are you stopping yourself from crying?” Evelyn asked very gently. This was not a rhetorical question. She seemed genuinely confounded. Then I was genuinely confounded. The whole thing felt like a trick. What did she mean? We all stop ourselves from crying. Crying is pathetic, lame. It’s a sign of weakness. I mean, crying in your car in a parking lot at two A.M. while eating old Hershey’s Kisses you found half unwrapped in your purse is one thing, but in public with another person? Unconscionable.
“Crying is a solution,” she said. This statement blindsided me, because I had always thought crying was a sign of failure. In our culture we’re made to feel ashamed of showing our feelings, of being vulnerable. If a woman cries, she’s crazy, emotional, has PMS, or whatever the most current pejorative dismissive term is. As I write this, “psycho” is pretty popular, but it seems like “hot mess” is making quite a comeback.