I have always been an emotional girl, and there is truly no exception to that statement. I will cry over anything. A cute dog I see walking around campus, a bad grade on an exam, an argument with my mom. You name it, I will probably already have tears streaming down my face. While I say it lightly now, it is not always something that was easy to come to terms with. In elementary, middle, and high school, I was constantly pegged as the "crybaby" and was always the one that the teacher needed to work with to make sure they were okay and emotionally stable enough to continue playing on the playground. It used to be very difficult for me to not only make friends, but to keep them. As many people have been quoted with, "nobody wants to be friends with a crybaby". But the truth of the matter was, and is, that is who I am, who I have always been, and who I will always will be.

My emotional state of mind is due mainly to a barrier in my emotional mental health that was never fully addressed when I was a child. I was nicknamed "smiley", but on the other side of the spectrum, I was also nicknamed the crier. This emotional instability stemmed, and continues to stem from my anxiety and depression. While I have never openly discussed this issue, it is something that I feel needs to be brought to attention.

JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE CRYING DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE.

I will say it one more time for the people in the back.

JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE CRYING DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE.

This is essential in order to help people who may be more "emotionally stable" than I am to understand. Mental health is not something that I am in control of. While yes, I am in control of how I react to things, there is something inside of me that gets triggered when someone raises their voice at me. There is an uncontrollable amount of uncomfortableness, that results in me overthinking, overanalyzing, and in result, over-crying -- over something that may have the simplest of solutions.

The reason I want to bring this to everyone's attention is because it is time that we stop putting people down for crying every few days, every few hours, or every few minutes. Some people have more emotional backgrounds than others, and if you are lucky like me, you were taught to embrace your emotions rather than run from them.

My mother always expressed to me how important it is to release the negative emotions that have built up inside of you, and I couldn't agree more. As negative emotions build up inside of you, you create not only a toxic environment for others, but a toxic environment for yourself.

You have to spend the rest of your life in your body, in your mind, and in your soul.

So why not embrace the emotions that come and go with each passing moment?

Whether you laugh too hard, whether you scream too loud, whether you cry a river, you have every right to express your emotions.

Stop running from them -- Learn to swim in the river of your tears.