Maiaelizabeth.com

Growing up I never cried in front of anyone but my parents.  I developed parts of the persona I carry with me now very early in life and crying just wasn’t something I allowed myself to do.  The day I learned how to cry I was probably around 11 years old.  I had fallen off a horse for the first time and let me tell you, I was SHOOK.  As I was trying to get up my trainer asked if I was okay and for the first time that I remember in my life, I said no and I cried.  From that moment on it was a struggle to regain the part of myself that never admitted she wasn’t okay, the part of me that never cried.  The feeling I had when I realized I actually was okay and that my tears were serving no purpose was pathetic.  I felt weak, I felt like I had taken a mask off and I was no longer the strongest person I knew, I was just someone else who cries. 

 That feeling never left me, the feeling that showing you’re not okay is a weakness that detracts from the strength of your being.  Everyone asks me how I get over things so quickly and in part I owe it to the girl I was before I learned to cry.  I carried with me and never forgot the feeling of weakness that ALWAYS follows my tears, the feeling that says “see, you’re fine, and now you’ve shed tears for nothing.  Now you’ve shown your weakness, and for what?” I have been stuck in an internal battle between the “me” that feels shame when she cries and the “me” that has dealt with tragedy and refuses to acknowledge the pain that has worn away at me everyday.

 When my brother died I can count on my hands how many times I cried.  When I spoke at his funeral it was the first time my friends and family really saw me cry.  Afterwards my aunt came up to me and said “I was so worried about you until I finally saw you cry, then I knew you’d be okay”
When my brother died I saw it as a challenge.  Before me was something that I never thought I’d go through, now was my chance to regain the armor I thought was lost to me the day I learned to cry.  I forced myself out of sadness, I skipped his second viewing to go to prom and a horse show.  I forced myself to be the person that people looked at and said “I don’t know how she does it.”  People would ask how I was doing and my answer was automatic and robotic “I’m good! I mean that seems like a bad answer but I can’t change the situation so why spend any time sad about it.” At that point 50% of people looked at me like I was a psychopath and the other 50% looked at me pitifully like I was a sad baby bird.  It was those looks that drove me to continue to be okay, until everyone, including myself was fully convinced that I was telling the truth.

You can see the long term, incredibly unhealthy coping mechanisms that I developed.  Coping mechanisms that forced everything so far down that the only time they surfaced was when I was drunk and something else was making me sad.  I’ll tell you what, this did not make me look like the most mentally stable person in the world. 

This year when my boyfriend and I broke up (a couple weeks before my brother’s birthday) I cried, unwillingly, for a long time.  I said to my mom “Logically I know I’m fine, logically I know I will be okay and the world is not over, my life is not over but I’m struggling because even though I KNOW these things logically, that’s just not how I feel.”  When I was done crying I was filled with my usual post-cry emptiness.  I didn’t want to feel that yet so I tried to keep crying, to feel anything but shame, but no tears came.  And in that moment I came to a conclusion. 

 Not all tears are the same.  The tears that stemmed from the loss of my relationship were sad. The conflict between what I knew to be logical vs how I felt in those moments is what left me feeling like the cry had been pointless.  I let the tears I had cried and the aftermath of my self-deprecating emotions push me to focus on accepting the reality that my world was not over and I would be fine.  Instead of forcing myself to obsess over the “weakness” I, at one point, would’ve been convinced I was showing, I started to think of the tears as my pain on its way out- they were useful, they were necessary- and the feeling I was left with became my driver- no longer my driver to shame myself in to feeling nothing, but my driver to let go of the pain and sadness and find a way to fill the emptiness with anything else.   

This year on my brother’s birthday, I let myself cry.  And for the first time since the day I learned to cry, the only feeling that followed was peace.  The tears I shed no longer left me feeling hollow and exposed, they filled me with pride and love.  I probably took 10 “bathroom breaks” at work to let myself cry while reading happy memories that his friends and our family had sent me, while looking at pictures of us and trying to repaint the memories that have faded with time.  The feeling I was left with after those tears felt like strength, it felt like power, it was armor, a shield to serve as a reminder that I have felt all the pain in the world and I am alive. There is no fire in this world that I can’t walk through, nothing that can take my shield from me.  

So for all the girls in my life that have told me I am strong, that have asked me HOW I’m strong, that have shared their struggles with me in the hopes that I have some answer for them that will make them FEEL like their life isn’t over and the world isn’t ending, here it is-

• No amount of liquor will solve your problems, trust me, the amount of tequila I’ve ingested this week alone would’ve solved every one of our problems if that was a possibility.
• Crying is healthy and natural but it has a threshold, and once that has been crossed crying is no longer the only answer, if it hasn’t brought you peace then LISTEN to what your tears are telling you. 
•  There is a difference between knowing the truth and FEELING it, between understanding reality and BELIEVING it. 
• Let grief guide you only to the exhaustion of your tears.  Use self awareness as a ladder out of the dark. Turn logic into hope when you start to doubt your strength.
• Remember that every journey grief has taken you on, started with the thought that you would never be okay again, and at the end of all those journeys you found your peace. 
• This journey is no different and it starts by picking up your shield.

-XOXO MaiaElizabeth