please cry your eyes out
✿ no really—and here's how
I learned to cry—like really cry—while curled up on the cheap porcelain of my shitty little apartment’s shitty little bathtub. The year was 2017 and I was living in soggy, smug Vancouver. I was thriving according to society’s thrive standards: post-secondary education, stable 9-5 corporate job, married to a nice guy, savings account, big group of friends, a side hustle or two.
And yet there was an emptiness.
A vast, pervasive, pulsating, cavernous, engulfing emptiness. An emptiness I micromanaged with excess consumption. An emptiness that disallowed joy to loiter. An emptiness, that if truly looked at, would surely destroy me—I figured.
What was wrong with me? Who wouldn’t feel content with a post-secondary education, a stable 9-5 corporate job, being married to a nice guy, a savings account, a big group of friends, and a side hustle or two?
…the lucky ones, as it turns out.
Despite my best consumptive efforts, that darn emptiness persisted in the way that emptiness tends to persist, and eventually, broke me. The lacy, off-white tablecloth of truth was ripped out from under. My carefully arranged dining set of delusion smashed.
Whose life was I even living?
When did I choose any of this?
How did I get here?
By December, my soon-to-be ex-husband was slogging the last of his belongings down our three-storey walk-up and into his silver ‘97 Corolla. It was 6:30 PM, which in Canadian winter, meant the sun had long since set. The car groaned, overstuffed. Shabby red tail lights glowed with goodbyes.
We hugged awkwardly, lovingly, sadly. I made one last attempt to be wifely, checking the snack supply levels for his road trip to Cortes Island. I felt the dull twist of guilt. He’d done nothing wrong. He was the best kind of kind.
It’s just that the emptiness presented a more compelling case for needing me.
Back upstairs after seeing him off, I numbly ran a shower. The tub left much to be desired—cheap yellowish porcelain, finicky knobs, moldy grout, a soap-scummy opaque door that croaked at its hinge—yet I loved it just the same.
Little did I know then: that tub would become my sanctuary.
Because on that day and for the eighteen months of initiatory upheaval that followed, I wept, cradled by the roundness of its porcelain breast, protected behind its soap-scummy shield, unknowingly transforming the very core of my being.
And guess what?
I’m still weeping these seven years later. Turns out I was right—it did destroy me. A most necessary destruction indeed. In the years following tub era, the intensity and sheer volume of unacknowledged and unmetabolized pain shrunk from a roaring, uncharted rapids to a manageable, meandering creek.
That emptiness.
That drive to excess.
That numb, exhausted, anxious feeling that never ceased.
The one I used to take anti-depressants for.
All along,
It was grief.
Untapped, unfelt, unexpressed, swirling grief.
Every tear I hadn’t cried.
Every loss I’d yet to reconcile.
It was grief.
Good grief.
Here’s what I’ve learned from crying my eyes out these past seven years:
01—Westernized cultures are woefully grief intolerant
We are the blind leading the blind, influenced by invisible fields of belief that encourage the suppression of feeling. Whether malevolently or ignorantly, we are rewarded for chasing “positive” emotions and distancing ourselves from “negative” ones. The fact that we even label emotions as positive and negative speaks volumes.
I can’t name one single person whose upbringing included a reverence for grief. “Oh no, don’t cry” is an often whispered phrase. Tears are seen as something to choke down and halt rather than let run their full course. Most people I know apologize for crying as if its an inconvenience or shameful act. And you rarely see anyone discussing how emotion powerfully informs our capacities, boundaries, instincts, needs, and desires.
We only know what we know and I’d say it’s time to know new things.
02—Unmetabolized grief is exhausting us
Picture yourself in a swimming pool. The water is the perfect temp and there’s a bright pink ball floating near you. You grab the ball and hold it underwater. Maybe you wobbly try to stand on it. Maybe you tuck it between your upper knees and squeeze.
If you’ve ever done this IRL you know how much effort it takes to keep that air-filled ball under. The ball wants to float. The ball wants to surface.
And so too do our emotions. Think of how exhausting it would be for you to keep that ball under for a long, long time. Think of how exhausting it is to keep how you truly feel hidden for a long, long time.
This so-called epidemic of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia? I ain’t buying it. What we are is exhausted from keeping it all together. What we need is to crack open and spill out. What we need is to feel the extent of our devastation. What we need is to respect the wisdom of our broken-heartedness.
What we need is to grieve.
03—Unmetabolized grief is what drove my compulsions and addictions
The more I grieve, the less compulsive my behavior. The more I grieve, the less desire I have to escape reality. The more I grieve, the more resilience I have access to. The more I grieve, the better I sleep. The more I grieve, the less tight my neck and shoulders. The more I grieve, the more flexible my nervous system responses. The more I grieve, the more empathy and tolerance I have for others. The more I grieve, the more nuance I can hold. The more I grieve, the more mature and integrated my perspective.
It’s hard to run away if the fuel for the running away part is drained out, ya know?
Dissociation is how we orbit—and we really need this sometimes.
Grief is how we land.
04—Nothing reveals like grief
Want clarity? Learn to grieve. Truth is a frozen block and grief is the sweeping, thawing warmth. Grief places you right smack in the center of truth: how you truly feel, what truly happened, what is truly going on. Grief is like wading into crystal clear waters. Grief is renewal. Grief is knowing.
05—Grieving could change everything
The more I grieve, the more comfortable my capacity to be with pain. The more comfortable my capacity to be with pain, the more I can be with another’s pain. The more I can be with another’s pain, the more connected to life I feel. The more connected to life I feel, the more trust, love, and harmony I have access to. The more trust, love, and harmony I have access to, the more I spread that shit around to everyone and everything.
Imagine a society filled with those who grieve?
Imagine the care, love, empathy, and faith we’d have for each other?
06—It’s one of those things that needs to be experienced to be believed
Okay so on paper, the idea of crying all the tears you never cried and feeling all the losses you never felt sounds super sucky, right? And I’m gonna give it to you straight. It is super sucky.
But it’s also poetic.
And brilliant.
Grieving is the healing feeling.
It brings even the most numbed-out people (me!) back online.
It shakes stagnating qi from the branches of your tired soul.
It breathes life back into you.
It holds you like the fiercest, warmest mother.
It protects you like the strongest, loving father.
It is as potent and messy and wet as an orgasm.
Grieving is what saved me from killing myself.
I didn’t believe in it ‘til I had no choice but to.
07—Grief is for every loss: big and small, tangible and intangible, micro and macro, shallow and deep
An incomplete list of things I’ve grieved:
Every relationship I ever fumbled
Every friendship I ever fumbled
Every relationship and friendship that fumbled me
How little I’ve cared about others
How little I’ve cared about myself
How out of touch with the natural world we are
How people can’t see how socially engineered we are
How distracted we are
How infected by colonization we are
How quickly technology and social media changed everything
How few, true friends I have
My favorite hat that fell down a campsite outhouse hole when I was 7
My young, hot, early-twenties body
My life before I woke up
That I never got to experience a loving mother-daughter relationship
That I never got to experience a loving father-daughter relationship
Old identities that are no longer me
Being misunderstood, unseen, projected upon, expected upon
This one box filled with expensive shoes that my sister accidentally donated
All the ways shame has stopped me from wanting to be seen
Who I could have been had I been raised in a loving home
What I could have accomplished by now had I been parented
All the sex I had while blackout drunk
All the money I spent on coping mechanisms
That I even had to cope so hard in the first place
08—Grief erodes away the hardness from our hearts
If you knew me before I began to grieve, you’d probably think me a bit of a narcissistic bitch. Because I was. Because I wasn’t in touch with my heart. Because I was in full blown protection mode. Cold. Distant. Unfeeling. Unempathetic. Guarded from a lifetime of unrelenting pain. A gal with a hardened heart.
Grieving restores empathy.
Grieving renews.
Grieving gifts us the full spectrum of feeling and softens our hearts.
09—Crying is as necessary as farting
What happens to your insides when you hold in a fart? What would happen if you held in a fart for years and years and years? I don’t even wanna know the answer to that (quick, someone Google it and put it in the comments!) Our bodies have all sorts of mechanisms for release: sweating, sneezing, shaking, puking, coughing, farting, burping, pooping, peeing, yawning, crying.
Crying is as natural a release as a fart.
We need to fart.
We also need to cry.
10—Most people say they feel better after a good cry. Coincidence?
Nah.
And because I love you and want you to grieve well, I’ve compiled a list of what I’ve practiced personally—what’s worked to encourage my own flow of tears.
Notice I wrote encouraged and not forced. Grief can’t be forced. You wouldn’t force a fart, would you? The reason for the encouragement? Grieving can be a bit scary right before you do it. The build up. The pre-show. We get all in our heads and tell ourselves stories about how intense and scary it will be. This happened for me often in the beginning. But with courage, patience, titration, and dedication, it became as natural and relaxed as, well…
Ok, no more fart analogies.
How do you know if you need to grieve?
Chronic neck and shoulder pain. Overthinking. Inability to focus. Anxiety. Feeling stuck in flight mode: always busy and productive, compulsively saying yes, endless scrolling. Exhaustion. Sleep troubles. Digestion issues. Numbness… to name a few.
Couple more notes: Go slow. Ease into the waters. Thawing our frozen grief is a slow and steady process of expanding our capacity to practice tension and release. We need to practice this and our practice needs to be slow at first.
This journey is non-linear. This journey is intense and beautiful and painful. It does not fuck with rhyme or reason. It directs us right to the hurt spot and often the hurt spot surprises us. It might not be a spot you expected. Or it might be exactly the spot you expected.
Easy does it.
Feel a little bit, then back off.
Wade in, then surface.
Touch it, let it be.
Remember: grief is love.
Grieving is the act of learning to love.
But if you really can’t cry, don’t. It might not be your time. Trust that you will be shown when and if it is your time—grief is a reliable, mystical guide like that.
And remember: I was one of those completely shut down, unfeeling and frozen peeps. If my frozen ass can learn how to do this? Hell. Anyone can.
How I’ve encouraged the flow of grief:
Dancing
Wiggling
Shaking
Trembling
Stretching
Lifting weights
Getting sober
Running
Walking
Sitting by water; speaking to water; being near water
Asking spirits for help in feeling my grief; gifting them offers of thanks
Singing
Cuddles with animals
Cuddles with humans
Therapy for complex trauma: IFS, EMDR, NARM, SE, Coherence Therapy
Writing lists of everything I can remember that has hurt or harmed me
Writing lists of everything I’ve done to hurt or harm others
Writing myself apology letters
Writing others apology letters; sending them is optional
Writing sad and angry letters I’m not going to send, to those who have harmed me; sharing them with a trusted other
Getting into child’s pose and gently rock forwards, back, side to side
Chanting odd grunting sounds, like an animal
Breathwork
Humming
Thinking about really sad shit
Thinking about other people’s sad shit and then overlaying the sadness I feel for them onto my own sad shit
Stopped hanging around people who are emotionally constipated
Sharing my grief learnings and experience with treasured, trusted others
Intuitive movements (not quite yoga, but not quite dancing)
Punching the crap out of a pillow
Screaming into a pillow
Punching the crap out of a human-sized grappling dummy
Cuddling with the human-sized grappling dummy afterwards
Putting on loud music in headphones and imagining the lyrics are about my life specifically
Watching movies with the same themes as the losses I’ve experienced (the father daughter stuff really got me going)
Watching beautiful, moving movies that inspire
Listening to classical music
Listening to any music really, as long as it’s loud and melodic
Reading healing books, follow writers who speak about grief
Creating a safe, comfortable space in my home where I can be with grief, filled with art and plants and trinkets that I love
Laying down in a bathtub with the shower running
Bathing in general; epsom salts and magnesium flakes!
Showers with hanging eucalyptus
Shamanic entity removal
Energy hygiene practice à la Donna Eden
Like I said in this essay, grieving is by far the most impactful healing modality I’ve tried. It’s pure magic. I dare say it’s a cure-all.
May the world know the depths of its grief.
May our spilled tears water deepening roots.
May touching our personal devastations catalyze the collective change we so desperately need.
↓ More Goodies:
Everything you read here is written and edited by these nimble human fingers (and sometimes thumbs.) I do not and will not use AI to write or edit my words. I believe in the grunt work of artistry. To me, this is a holy practice.
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As a studying death doula, interpersonal healer, and former sacred rage practitioner who has been through massive grief initiations, I wholeheartedly approve of not only the overarching message, but all of the methods-as well as the presentation. Bravo.