A week of sad things

I wanted this week to consist of uplifting Christmas spirit posts. I was going to write about all of the sad things, but do it next week as a way of symbolically leaving them in 2014. It sounded like a reasonable plan but, maybe because I am feeling pretty sad now, this is the was to go.

I am going over different years by song in a countdown to my birthday. 1979 was "Don't Cry Out Loud" by Melissa Manchester. The reason I picked it was because of three memories, all of which happened before then, but that was the year the song charted. I do remember being moved by it, even though I would never run off with clowns.

Sometimes we have memories that stand really clear, like snapshots. There have been times when I have wondered why certain things stuck with me so much. With some, I have later understood that it was a moment that was forming my worldview. I have three strong memories of crying.

I know that there were other times when I cried. I don't remember why I was crying for any of them. That's not what the memories are about. I think they all happened between the ages of 3 and 6.

The earliest was crying in a store, and my father spanked me. He spanked me because I was crying; I wasn't crying because I was spanked. I know that could make sense in the "I'll give you something to cry about" way, but I specifically had to stop crying after that, so no.

The second was with my older sister. She was watching me for a few minutes while our mother stepped out. We were supposed to go to Wildlife Safari that weekend, and I started crying about something, probably that she did. She was afraid if Mom came back and found me crying the trip would be off, so she got a knife and threatened me with it so I would stop crying. I am mostly positive now that she would not really have stabbed me, because she would have gotten in worse trouble for that than for a crying sibling, but I was really scared at the time.

Finally, my brother once offered me a candy bar to stop crying. It's not as bad, except in reinforcing food as a helpful form of comfort.

I don't think I spent an unusual amount of time crying as a child, but every specific memory I have of it basically boiled down to "Don't; no one wants to hear that." Maybe they are embarrassed because it's in public, or because it looks like a personal failure on their part, or maybe it is just annoying. Maybe they will hurt you, or threaten you, or be nice enough to get rid of you, but seriously just shut up already!

Just keep it inside, learn how to hide your feelings.

And I did. I got very good at hiding my feelings. Another thing that I learned from my father (and it was false, but a lot of these worldview moments were false) was that you can't really show any weaknesses or people will look down on you, so it made sense. Crying or being hurt or sad was a weakness, and you needed to hide it.

There were a couple of side affects. One is that I always cried in movies. It didn't even have to be a particularly sad movie, but at some point some music would swell or something, and I would be gone. Well, it's in the dark, and it's not about you, so that's a safe place.

Also, about twice a year I would lose it. Too much pain would build up and I would have a very depressed and difficult weekend, and frustrate my mother. It was never really that it passed, but then things would be back under control until the next time. Of course, years later when it all came out, it took me months to recover.

I think the real problem was beyond thinking that crying was bad. If the expression of the emotions was invalid, then the emotions had to be invalid too. I didn't get to where I would sneak off by myself to deal with the things that hurt me; I tried to not feel them at all.

Surprisingly, this did not make my sorrows magically disappear. Instead, I got more distant from understanding myself. There were things that hurt a lot that could have been changed - things I should have objected to or reconciled with - and it left me with a lot of ground to make up.

I probably over analyze things now. There are also things that I still don't know how to deal with well. I am trying.