Initial Conditions

November 11th is, for me, a significant date. Certainly, armistice day is an important enough thing to acknowledge, but every time it comes round, I am reminded that it’s another year since I last cried.

I cast my mind back to the night of November 9th, 2002. The CU weekend away was in full swing, but I was not there, as I had decided that I didn’t have £40 to spare (I was in First Year, and finances weren’t really my strong point back then). It was for the best that I didn’t go, because that night I got ill. For the benefit of certain people who I know read this blog, I won’t go into the details of this illness but needless to say, I didn’t get a great deal of sleep that night. I was really not well at all, and it went on for a couple of days. By the end of it, on November 11th, I just broke down and cried and cried and cried in my room because I just couldn’t cope with the being unwell and not having my family there to comfort me (I must admit though that the girls who stayed either side of me in halls were terrific, knocked on my door to make sure I was ok and got me some coke). I got better soon enough though.

Anyway, that was the last time that I properly cried. Since then, crying just hasn’t happened, even though a lot has. I’ve had anxiety, heartbreak, rejection, disappointment, death of friends and relatives, loneliness, identity crises, bad blood with folks, illness, failure, acts of God destroying significant portions of my work, friends having issues and other things I won’t mention. But there were also happy things like friends getting married and having kids, graduating, passing my driving test, unexpected surprises, getting good results for my thesis, and other things that I can’t think of. In other words, I’ve led pretty much a normal life (with some good and bad bits that come with the territory of what I do).

It’s not a secret that I seem unable to cry. When I say this to people, they tend to assume that I’m just being a guy and that I don’t want to be seen crying, but I assure you that this is not the case. I feel emotions like everyone else, it’s just that there now appears to be a barrier preventing me from displaying them. I think crying, done in moderation, is a healthy thing as I can recall that once it was over, it provided some kind of finality to whatever it was that you were going through, kind of just getting it all off your system if you like. There are many times I have wondered if what I was going through would be less traumatic if only I could just shed a few tears over it, but as it stands I’m stuck with at most one at a time. I guess it’s not a major problem, and it’s not something I worry about consistently, but I sometimes wonder if things would be different if I could. There are some contexts I could maybe seeing it becoming an issue in, but those aren’t really relevant at this point in time.

But I suppose this will be another addition in my “questions to ask God after the resurrection” pile.

NB I’m not really looking for answers (or indeed, sympathy), my main motivation for writing this post was that I had a couple of conversations with people about this recently and I just wanted to clarify some things.