Essay: Why Can't I Cry Anymore?

When The Tears Run Out.

Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash

It sounds odd, but once I prided myself on my ability to cry.  Men, so we were informed, suppressed their emotions, kept them battened down in the face of all vicissitude. To behave otherwise was to be labelled a cry-baby. Whereas I was lachrymosity personified.

I cried in front of the editor when I quit my first job ( at the tender age of 20). I cried when I fell in love. I cried when I split up with the person I fell in love with.

I cried in sappy films and when my feelings were hurt.  Sometimes I cried for no reason. I even cried semi-deliberately sometimes ( I think the idea is that my girlfriend or whoever, would think what a sensitive soul I was).

But nowadays I don’t cry anymore. And after I read this article from the School of Life, I started to think about why.

It’s true, there are rare occasions where I shed a tear.  The last time was, I think, in the last minutes of the film ‘The Father’ with Anthony Hopkins.  But it was a minor tear, I would say, not a massive sob, almost decorative. And what I was responding to wasn’t real. It was just a representation of reality.