About a decade ago, I realized people were often crying around me. I saw folks crying in surprising settings (a guy crying in an art supply store), people crying in what turned out to be common settings (many people cry while jogging), people crying while doing something mundane (one guy while eating a corn muffin, a few others while vaping). I wanted to know their stories. Why were these people crying? Were they in the middle of an intractable conflict? Did they just get terrible news? Had they made it to the other side of a seemingly impossible situation?
I started tweeting these random encounters with tears on the streets of New York. To my surprise, tens of thousands of people started liking, retweeting and commenting on my tweets, or dm-ing me about their own crying encounters. Everybody cries, obviously, and so these things resonate. When you’re the one crying you can feel quite alone, but you truly aren’t. As I reported on what I saw, it turned into an unexpected way to find common ground with strangers.
Crying is therapeutic. A sob is cathartic. Scientifically speaking, emotional tears release stress hormones, so your stress levels are lower when you cry, which is why a good cry can often lead to a good sleep. It can also strengthen your immune system. It can also be thrilling. I’ve definitely been jogging, and a moving song comes on, and I enjoy crying as I pass people on the street. Crying gives us permission to open up, let down our guard, embrace those things that make us feel vulnerable. By sharing, we see that crying is universal, and that tears should, in fact, be celebrated. Don’t take it from me, though, here are several of my friends, and strangers, on the matter.
Olivia Lineberry, zookeeper
As I write this, I’m told of the passing of another animal. I’ve been a zookeeper for four years now and have worked with a huge variety of taxa. I have come to know well over one hundred individuals over the years. I spend just as much time at work with these guys as I do with my own at home. So, when it’s time to say goodbye, it hurts just the same.
My team are all respectful of how each person grieves. We even have designated places that we have deemed best for crying: inside the zoo van, behind the goat barn, in the tortoise yard.
A brown-and-white guinea pig, Luna, who looked like a little baked potato, far surpassed her life expectancy, but didn’t wake up from anesthesia. We weren’t prepared, so we didn’t say goodbye beforehand. I wasn’t at work when it happened, so I cried at home when I was told the news.
Mike Birbiglia, comedian
I’m watching the movie Spotlight with my wife, Jenny, in our living room. I’m crying. That kind of crying where if you were in a car in the rain you’d have to pull over. The moment that breaks me is when a man confesses to a reporter in a diner that he was molested by a priest when he was a child. There’s something about this scene that is so vivid and real and painful that, after all of the articles I’ve read and news reports and documentaries about the sexual abuse by Catholic priests, this was the scene that broke me.
I’m crying so hard that I actually have to pause the movie. I cry for 15min before we turn it back on. I’ve never cried like this during a movie, which possibly made Jen think that I was abused as a child. I was an altar boy in Massachusetts, after all. But I wasn’t abused, not to my knowledge. There was something about this film and what I’ve read cumulatively that made me cry for all those kids. Maybe I knew kids who were abused. Maybe I didn’t.
Comedians sometimes get criticized for dark jokes that take on dark topics. But I believe that those jokes shine a light too. We can’t fill our days with relentless documentaries about pain and abuse. I mean, we can. I listen to public radio too. But most people simply don’t. It would be too much pain to bear. Jokes are a way that we acknowledge the darkness. They allow us to say: “I can see you and I can laugh at you and someday I may defeat you.” Just because comedians laugh at the darkness doesn’t mean they don’t cry too.
Sara Quin, writer and musician (one half of Tegan and Sara)
The earliest days of the pandemic were rain-soaked and black. From my studio window in north Vancouver, I watched crows dive-bomb the black-capped chickadees that were perched on the bird feeders I’d hung in the cedar trees. Tour was canceled and the fertility treatment my partner and I started a year earlier was suspended. It seemed that not only our lives were in limbo, but even the possibility of life. Fiddleheads poked out of the ferns in April and I bought trays of hostas to plant next to them in the garden. Mom visited, at a distance, and together we dug holes in the damp soil.
I took afternoon walks in Mosquito Creek, listening to audiobooks about murder and cancer. The dread and grief that had enveloped me during the early months of lockdown dissipated and this new routine became comforting. There was another winter, a spring, and the hottest summer in a 100 years. Tegan got a pandemic puppy, we all got vaccines and the familiar feeling of life, picking up speed, returned. In September we flew south and recorded an album of songs about change and never changing, and the nostalgia aching in both our bones. As we started our final week in the studio, my partner sent me a photograph of a positive pregnancy test. Cry, baby.
Jill Greenberg created her series “End Times”, which featured photographs of toddlers crying, in 2005, when she was a new mother and pregnant with her second child. The project was a response to her frustration with George W Bush’s re-election and the religious right’s belief in the rapture, and her concomitant sense of powerlessness. The upstate New York-based artist’s portraits of children throwing fits prompted some criticism, with some people saying that capturing toddlers in distress was inhumane. But she doesn’t see cruelty when she looks back at the work. “Children use crying very directly to communicate because they don’t have words,” she said. “Who says crying is bad? When you are upset or anxious and feeling overwhelmed, sometimes crying can be a means of release. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to be exhausted afterwards, but holding in your emotions isn’t the solution.”
Henry Stosuy, middle schooler
I cried when we got the message that school was canceled during the start of the pandemic. I cried because it was my second-to-final year of elementary school and I knew I would never see a lot of those kids again.
Alan Wyffels, musician and member of Perfume Genius
My grandma was my favorite person in the world. I did not cry at my grandma’s funeral. I am now on a plane watching Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich advocate for a promotion and the tears are streaming down my face. Is something misfiring up there? Is there a science behind why we turn into sniveling messes the moment we reach 10,000ft? Someone recently asked me if I am a “crier” and I didn’t know how to answer that. I certainly do not feel like a “normal” crier. I have had tearless spells that have lasted five years, yet I’ve also cried every day for weeks on end. I can listen to an entire record with explicit lyrics about grief and loss and not shed a single tear. However, some days I can sit at the piano, simply play the plagal cadence of IV to I (known as the “Amen” chords), and this will be enough to get me bawling. It seems as though the demented gatekeeper of my tears is playing a twisted game with me. I wish there was a pressure point we could squeeze, some sort of pill or potion we could take to initiate crying on demand. A prescription of a daily cry would make the world a much better place, don’t you think?
Sloane Crosley, author of Grief is for People
I cry so much, you could salt pasta water with the tears on my cheeks. I do it regularly, with both joy and sorrow, at the sight of certain mementos or videos, but the most vivid instances involve witnesses. Crying opens a portal of awkwardness in other people. No one knows how to handle how fast you’ve reached the edge, especially if you are, for the most part, an even-keeled person. When someone bursts into hysterics, it highlights how little we understand the emotional range of others. Several years ago, I was sleeping with a man shortly after the sudden death of my best friend. I knocked my head against his wall and this moderate pain unlocked something both extreme and embarrassing. I don’t think I’ve cried that hard before or since, in front of anyone, and I hated him a little in that moment, for being there to witness it, for patting me on the head.
But my sharpest and earliest memory of a witness to unmitigated tears came after hearing the Joan Baez song February. I was in middle school and some local sadist must’ve put it on a mixtape. The song is about a couple whose relationship falls apart. Over Christmas, they give each other presents but no cards. Ouch. By the time spring comes and the buds push up through the ground, our heroine is so devoid of romantic feeling, she has no idea what the fuck flowers are. She takes a walk with her lover and he points out a crocus and she asks, “What’s a crocus?” “It’s a flower,” he explains. Then she asks: “What’s a flower?” My mind was awash with despair. I went into my mother’s room, presuming a generational familiarity with Joan Baez. But she had never heard this song. So I played it for her, putting headphones over her ears while I offered DVD-style commentary (“She forgets what flowers are!!”) and cried anew. My mother diagnosed the song as “maudlin”. But she could see it was stirring something profound in her young daughter. She hugged me tightly, trying not to laugh, trying to assure me that these things happen in love. Sometimes they’re worth it and sometimes they’re not, but this too shall pass. Better than a pat on the head, I suppose.
Hanif Abdurraqib, poet
There is no shortage of crying on airplanes. Babies screech and moan through their assorted discomforts. People watch movies on small screens and put their hands over their mouths while a single tear descends. I’ve seen it, sure. I’ve tried to look away, but I’ve been there too. You and I have perhaps met there, in that rarified garden of weeping. I am not ashamed of crying in public. Yet there is some thing about having it happen on an airplane that feels jarring. For me, it arrives unexpectedly. I’m in a metal container, affixed to a seat among people who might recognize the rush of emotion but might not be all that interested in talking about it. I don’t want to combat science or psychology, but I would like to offer an alternative: if there is a heaven, and if it exists in the sky, and if it holds everyone I have loved and everyone I miss, it is certainly higher than the heights any airplane can reach. And yet, you are still suspended, well above any of the living people you love and also miss. Too high to touch the living, not high enough to be an audience to your beloved dead. I propose that this is the loneliest place. The body might not know it, but it doesn’t matter. The heart rings the loudest bell. Everything else falls in line.
Matt Berninger, singer of The National
I’m 52 and I cry more now than when I was a kid. Of the grown men I’ve shared this with, including my dad, most of them have admitted the same thing. It’s a different kind of crying than I remember. I’m sure it has something to do with the series of traumas since 9/11, the passing of friends and the planet dying – but a lot of good things have happened in the last 20 years, too. It might just be that I’m finally comfortable with myself enough to let it out. I’ve matured into a crybaby.
My crying is almost never triggered by a specific event (although the Mister Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was a recent exception). It feels more like an intermittent release of general sadness and anxiety. It can happen anywhere – in cars, on my bike, at the beach, onstage – but it happens most often alone, in the hours before sunrise. This is the best place for it. I’ve been waking up around 5am every morning since my 30s. I used to lie there tossing and turning. I almost never fall back to sleep, so I stopped fighting it. I get up, make some tea, smoke a little weed and look out the window and think about everything. These are good hours.
Excerpt from Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, edited by Brandon Stosuy and illustrated by Rose Lazar. Copyright © 2023 by Brandon Stosuy and Rose Lazar. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.