Crying in Public (and other certified skills)
There are many things that are uncomfortable and scary about moving to a new city. However, there are many things that play very well in one’s favor — eating alone at a restaurant, dropping a bag of groceries and having your numerous skincare products roll onto the street, and crying in public.
Two weeks into my internship in Boston, I left work early on the Friday before the 4th of July and walked into a severely crowded Faneuil Hall, called a childhood friend and began sobbing. There I sat, on an extremely shaky ledge, next to an overflowing trash can, surrounded by pigeons cooing, bumping into each other and suddenly breaking into flight like an unexpected dance routine in a Broadway musical. Couples holding hands passed by — staring, parents — concerned, children — curious at this adult woman who appeared to be of an age where one would expect you to have everything figured out. Oh children, the things you will come to know.
An Indian uncle, ambling in an effortless stroll saw me and took a seat at the opposite end of the ledge. Surrounded by trash and pigeons and other clearly more comfortable wooden benches, he chose to sit by me and not look in my direction, the way my father would if he knew I were sad — not directly asking me what was bothering me, but playing my favorite song, roughly chopping an apple and placing it in my favorite Barbie bowl at the extreme edge of my desk, and sitting only far enough to give me space, though close enough to know I wasn’t alone.
‘Hi pappa, I’ll be ok.’
I sat there for almost two hours, a cacophony of emotions, as my friend and I exchanged heart-breaking stories, memories; 2 am for her and midday for me. I giggled and cried, flitting between the two — a confused, uninhibited individual giving my tears just enough facial real estate to dry, only to get doused again.
Activities like crying are popularly known to be performed in private, but oh, how freeing it is to break that rule. As a child, we’re told there are 7 main colors in a crayon box, and those are the 7 that will come to dominate our lives. We’re taught an acronym so as to never ever forget them — these 7, children, are all that matter. But as you evolve and try to fight the elements of space and time, awkwardly growing into an awkward shape and size, you discover colors beyond those 7. Who the heck invented teal? And lavender? Don’t even get me started on auburn.
It’s the very same for emotions.
As we evolve and try to fight the elements of space and time, awkwardly growing into an awkward shape and size, we discover an entirely new spectrum of emotions beyond what we were taught to expect. And initially we don’t realize how both enlightening and unshackling that feels. Come, let me show you:
BLUE — sadness
DARK BLUE — lonely sadness blasting Arijit Singh in your earphones
DARK ROYAL BLUE — inexplainable sadness on a summer day so instead of talking about it you get 3 scoops of the same flavor of ice cream in a large waffle cone and eat the whole damn thing before it begins to melt
ULTRAMARINE BLUE WITH A SWIRL OF COBALT (hex code #1800whatthefuckisgoingon) — so very sad that you break down in public and live to write about it so that all your friends and random people on the internet know what a baby you are, but guess what, you’re ok with that
When we say crying in ‘public’, this ‘public’ refers to an amassment of people just like us; on their personal journeys to discover more than just the VIBGYOR emotions and find courage in telling themselves — today I’m sad, and this is what I’m going to do for myself. Hence, after much deliberation with the inner workings of my mind, I have come to the conclusion that crying in public is, in fact, an act of service, giving those who pass us by on shaky ledges and engulfed by a sea of pigeons the permission to do the same. And liberating them in the process.
Think of all the unspoken rules placed on adults — how we must speak, how we must dress, how we must pretend to know how to eat with chopsticks and know all the lyrics to all the Kanye songs. We don’t think about how we are also unchained in how we become self-aware and allow ourselves to feel every emotion in our crayon box that it becomes akin to breaking into an unexpected dance routine like in a Broadway musical.
Crying in public, dropping your groceries, slurping your ramen noisily in an empty restaurant — we are free, as long as we allow ourselves to be. We can choose to cry with sunglasses on or off, loudly or quietly, to someone or to no one, and give ourselves the chance to unlock new, previously undiscovered emotions. We give ourselves the gift of knowing ourselves better. And we are liberated.
