When’s the Last Time You Cried?

For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive).

I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t totally surprising; by this point, I hadn’t cried for more than three years.

I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.

I started taking an SSRI a few years ago with the goal of giving me enough space to approach life’s challenges without feeling completely overwhelmed (by anxiety, by depression). The medication didn’t “fix” me…it just kept the train from derailing all the time (sometimes over the smallest things) and gave me the freedom to work through things on my own and with my therapist.¹

I was lucky to land on a good med/dose combo on my second try — the first pill I tried made me feel jittery and more anxious than I already was. But my current med does come with a couple of side effects. My sex drive is lower than it was (although that could also be age), which is not altogether unpleasant — a quieter mind in charge of things instead of a libido. The other side effect is that I don’t cry anymore, at least not as easily.

Crying is something I took up after my kids were born. Not often, but once every few weeks maybe. I cried when things got hard and for awhile, things were hard a lot of time: pandemic, parenting insecurity, divorce, living somewhere that really didn’t suit me, and always always the website & the discomfort of being an odd sort of “public figure”. Watching any movie with parents and kids (esp. dads and sons) got me — heck, even some Marvel movies got me. In sessions with my therapist, I cried when we’d hit a particularly tender vein of pain. As Gould says, the crying was cathartic and felt necessary — I always felt better and clearer afterwards.

But that’s mostly stopped since I’ve been on my meds. I still get sad, although less so, but I don’t cry. Movies don’t really get me going anymore. When my kids are struggling (in school, with friends), that gets me the closest. I miss that release — I feel a little pent-up sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade crying again for how I felt in the Before Times. I’m ok not having access to crying — at least for now.

1. I don’t usually talk about this sort of thing on the site and I don’t quite know why I’m talking about it now — Gould’s openness makes it easier maybe. And it may help someone else to hear about my experience? ↩

• Emily Gould
• Jason Kottke
• medicine
• parenting
• therapy