Pass the effing kleenex

When I was young, I cried all the time. It pissed off my mother, which seems unfair because she always cried a lot too. And it drives me insane how people think you should just be able to not do it, because duh, it's not like we do it for fun, or on demand. I got a little older. I still cried a lot. Weddings, funerals, auto shows. Then I stopped. I hardly ever cried any more. I thought maybe I was maturing. Maybe I was developing a nice hard cynical shell. Maybe I'd cried all the tears and there were none left.

Then I read a blog post where someone mentioned that she didn't cry any more because of the antidepressant she was on. I was thunderstruck. It was the drug? How did I miss that? I knew it made my eyes and mouth dry. I knew it made it hard to lose weight. How did I miss that it made me not cry? Which I was all in favour of, by the way - the less snotting up in public the better.

Now here I am. Since I started on the CPAP machine, I've gone to an extremely low dose of my antidepressant. And oh, fanfuckingtastic, I can cry again. Which would be fine if I could cry elegant, restrained movie-star tears - you know, just enough to feel in a sort of glamorous way that I'm able to hear the mournful music of the spheres, or feel the elegiac sere sadness of human life - shit like that.

But no. It's all ugly crying now. When Eve was at drama camp in London this summer and we went to the end-of-the-year show, the campers all sang this song and then the counsellors sang this song to the campers. If I'm ever caught in the car and one of these songs come on the radio? Good Christ, I have to pull over, it's freaking tearmageddon, the windshield fogs over, there are salt stains on the upholstery, HELP HELP, I NEED TO BE DEAD INSIDE AGAIN. I started watching this show because I stumbled over it on the Space channel and I needed to fill the space for a postapocalyptic tv show left when I realized that I couldn't force myself to watch the vapid, belly-button-exposing, generically-good-looking-leads dreck that is Revolution. It's mildly diverting, but it's not like I'm glued to it or anything. In fact, I was half-reading the paper today while watching. Then this woman is in labour and the baby is breech and this grizzled old soldier-guy walks in and washes his hands and says he helped the midwife turn his own daughter in utero before his wife's home birth. And suddenly I'm squishing up my face up so hard my chin is bumping my forehead in a desperate attempt to NOT START SOBBING ABOUT THIS STUPID ALIEN INVASION TV SHOW.

It's humiliating. It's undignified. Who the hell wants to walk around in constant danger of an incipient GLURT of weeping and wailing showering innocent bystanders? I'm going to have to up my dosage. Or get my tear ducts cauterized.

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.” 
― Richard Siken