How often do you cry?
I’m sitting on a local private bus in my state of Kerala. They are playing old Malayalam sad songs loudly. I listen to the music as the bus moves through the green-laden countryside. My window view speeds past the thickets of invasive plants with their wildly charming flowers, coconut trees, billboards and tea shops.
Everything comes together, the vanishing visuals, the melancholic music, everything. Memories of sadness, loss and loneliness engulf my mind. I cry. I try to look outside and avert my gaze because I don’t want anyone to see me crying.
When I am about to cry, I get a lump of sadness in my throat. It blocks out words painfully. I struggle to speak then and I have to cry it out. A good deep cry ends up in a beautiful relaxed and relieving feeling. So I prefer to cry about things which need to be cried about.
Yet I struggle to cry in front of others often. Sometimes it is that we need to hold back tears and smile to stay strong for someone else. It’s not a kind of pretentiousness, it’s just taking a step back to deal with our own emotions at another time, to be there for someone else.
To cry is to express one’s vulnerability. Everyone has their own space and people with whom they can be vulnerable. Sometimes, some things break all bounds. Like the news of a disease or death of someone dear. It’s a shock, so painful that we wouldn’t care where we are, with whom we are.
Yet there are times when we are too scared to process sad news or an unhappy realization. The heart might ache like it never did before, but we wouldn’t be able to cry.
In a way, one can fathom the depth of one’s relationship with another to the extent one can be vulnerable to the other. It could be feeling free to share silence without awkwardness to violently crying and whining without feeling even an ounce of self-depreciation.
Men are always told, not to cry. How often do we see our fathers or uncles crying? Not as many times as our mothers or aunts do. What happens to all those emotions that are bottled up? Do they come out as angst or anger directed at the less powerful, say, women or children?
Globally, the suicide mortality rate of men is much higher than women. One contributing factor to this gender gap is said to be the social conditioning of men to appear ‘strong’ and not to be vulnerable.
Now you might think Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal cried openly. Oh, they must be so secure about their masculinity. Oh, they broke the norms of patriarchy. But the truth is that ‘men crying’ in sports is lauded.
In her study exploring how emotions are tied to gender, titled “The Case of Men’s Crying in Competitive Sports” Heather J. MacArthur shows how it is seen as okay for men to cry in stereotypically masculine environments.
Participants in her study viewed male firefighters crying as more emotionally appropriate than male nurses doing so. Similarly, it is considered finer for male weight-lifters to cry than for male figure-skaters after a failure in a competition.
Essentially, this shows how society perceives vulnerable emotional expressions like crying as not emasculating in an environment which is highly masculine enough already. Or how someone (a firefighter) who already is an ideal of masculine stereotypes can cry because his masculinity is set and secure while someone like a male nurse is not.
If we perceive crying as an expression of vulnerability, then anger is also one of vulnerability but a bit different. When we cry, we maybe just cry. But when we are angry, often we are angry at someone.
Another person has to take the negative impact of our anger. Yet it need not be the person who caused the anger in the first place. Who gets to be angry at whom? Anger, power and privilege are so tied up.
The powerful one gets to be angry; the boss can yell but the employee cannot yell back. So, the employee may yell at his/her subordinate. If the person who made you angry is more powerful than you, then often we won’t take it out on them. We may not be in a position to even acknowledge it, in front of that person, “Hey you are making me angry”.
Instead, we would take it out in a different way. Maybe yell at your partner or child. Or throw your phone down or break a plate. Or eat junk or buy something unnecessary.
Think about this, how easy is it for anyone to get angry at someone in a lower position of work — say a domestic worker, a security guard etc? The politics of anger works along with the politics of gender, caste, religion, class and race.
That said, anger is a very valid emotion. Mostly, we use the word ‘management’ only when it comes to one emotion — ‘anger’. While it is true that anger — unreasoned, uncontrolled is dangerous and needs to be managed, anger is not all bad, always.
Anger is often an expression of enduring injustice, unfair treatment or discrimination. The lack of anger, or repression of anger and non-expression of it, at the right times in the right amounts, in the right places at the right people, ends up in perpetuating cycles of injustice — subtle or violent.
I used to be a person who used to get angry quickly; I had my own (un)reasonable reasons all the time. Gradually I began to work on it because some very close friends began to call me out whenever I was ‘rude’.
But, it got to an extent where I began to repress my anger and avoid situations out of my comfort zones because I was scared I would get angry. I was worried about what if I blurt out things which would hurt others or depreciate my reputation.
It takes constant reflection and patience to work on one’s ways of getting angry. It always begins with acknowledging the anger first to yourself, and then to relevant people around you. Then it is about understanding what caused it in the first place. With that, things would be better with time.
To be rightfully angry is a constant process of attainment. And, to cry freely, when the heart aches is an expression of strength.
