One of the things that really got to me was my crying. Crying, me, who was lauded my entire childhood and compared favorably against my older sister for the very specific reason of not crying- rarely crying as either an infant or a child. Tears would well up immediately if I were scolded, but that was it. It went without saying that I rarely cried as an adult. In elementary and high school, whenever I was bullied and needed to cry I would make sure that I was locked in a bathroom stall before commencing, silently, by opening my mouth wide so that the gasps would have minimal vibration. As an adult, I sometimes allowed myself to cry during certain book passages, during which I would feel a great squeezing in the center of my chest, as if my very heart was squeezing out the fluid that was pouring out of my eyes. Only when I’m reading do I allow myself to feel everything.
When I was small, in elementary school, crying felt like losing, synonymous with ‘defeat’, ‘failure’. As I grew older, crying meant a response, and a response, of any kind, was fodder for the Bullies. The boys who made animal noises at me to ‘mimic’ the language of my ethnicity or the girls who snickered and cursed me and threw things at me behind my back. Somehow they all knew, to accuse and make fun of me for something I was not- the boys would call me Japanese, and while there was nothing wrong with being Japanese, I am Chinese. The girls took a different tactic of calling me ‘boy’ for my thin frame and short hair, and similarly, while there is nothing wrong about being a boy, I am, in fact, a girl. For years I fought back; I would punch any boy within reaching distance and I would curse the girls right back, in Spanish. But the most effective defense, that I did not learn until maybe after I developed pneumonia in 5th grade, was to show no response at all. Perhaps that is when it became ingrained- Thou shall not cry. Thou shall especially never cry in public. If absolutely necessary, thou shall only cry in bathroom stalls with the door locked, and in absolute silence if there are any others in the bathroom. Thou shall only cry to show remorse when thy Dad is angry with you. To cry at any other time is an indulgence of a spoiled, rotten, wrong, bad, etc., child, teenager, adult.
But now I was very ill. And as my psychologist/teacher Heather said, all the ‘stuff’ I had been suppressing was similar to en ever-inflating beach ball that I had been hiding under the water and it had grown bigger than me; I could no longer keep it down. That enormous beach ball, in my moment of weakness, burst out of the water, slamming me in the face, erupting with a splash that sprinkled on anyone that was within my circle of regular interaction. Everyone wanted me to stop crying, and no one more than me. Yet every time I tried to explain, to pretend, to breathe, it all came out as sobs and tears squirting out of my eyes. I don’t remember ever crying that way, with crumpled face, shrieking wails, tears that poured and squirted. In those moments, the only things I could remember were things, people, events that hurt me in the past. Everything big and small was invited to come out for me to relive, and cry the tears for those moments that I did not allow myself to cry. Each of those moments had added a puff or two of air to that beach ball I had hidden deep in the ocean of my being, deep beneath the surface that did not ripple for anyone to see.