The clever albeit raunchy comedian Dane Cook said it best in his comedy sequence "Vicious Cycle," including a tiny segment called “Weep-a-thon”: “There’s those times where you need to cry. I’m talking about a real cry. I’m talking about you have to open up your soul and have a weep-a-thon.” Now there are many of you who are probably scoffing. Cry? Who does that? Certainly not you. You don’t have any feelings, thus nobody can hurt them. Friends…you know who you are. Despite this more or less universal affirmation that you’re invincible and can’t possibly be subjected to such a weep-a-thon, I feel like I can say you at least know what Cook was getting at. He continues his show with the assurance that during such a weep-a-thon, you pick a phrase to repeat, because hey! It’s all a part of the process. This phrase could be something related to the thing you’re crying about (“Why doesn’t he like me?,” “How could she?,” “Why am I not enough?”) or you could borrow Cook’s choice words: “I DID MY BEST!” Because some days, that’s all you can say.
The rubbish reality of life is that there will be days where nothing will go right. One of my dear friends has coined these “milk in the cupboard” days. Where you put the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge, and from that moment forward your day goes tumbling down that rabbit hole. It may start with the cereal and the milk and then cascade forward into losing your keys, being late for class or work, spilling coffee in your lap, etc. Or it may just be a moment where things get to be too much. Or something more serious and more permanent than a coffee stain, like a death in the family or a particularly messy breakup. Any way you paint it, whether it's a moment in the day, the whole day, or the whole week, we can all relate. And I believe the worst thing you can do is deny that fact. On the surface it may seem like you’re just showing a brave face, pulling up your big boy/girl pants and dealing with it. But at the core, you’re really just burying that sad emotion until it crawls out from the abyss at a later date when you’re not expecting it or wanting it to and it may have, by then, manifested itself in something unhealthy or harmful for you or someone dear to you. Essentially, you are denying your humanness. You are saying that you can defy the need for emotion or expression of that emotion or even other people to express that emotion to. Sure, go ahead and shrug whilst muttering “I did my best” under your breath, pretending that everything is just peachy keen and the bee’s knees and all those other adorable vintage sayings, but where’s your catharsis? Where is all that hurt you’re storing up? You do know that it’s hurting you don’t you, dear one?
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It all comes down to this: there are dark days ahead. There are days where you will do your best, but everything still comes to garbage and you will feel so lonely and so hurt. There will be those days you won’t understand why something bad is happening to you or worse, you think that bad thing happening to you is something you deserve because you’re a bad person. So with those days comes a kind of isolation — the world whispering that you shouldn’t show that bleeding heart to anyone including yourself. Internalize, because that makes the problem go away. But instead, I urge you to have a bit of a weep-a-thon. I encourage you to let it all out, whether to someone you trust or just to yourself. I implore you to accept that you are human and you are entitled to your feelings, that you did you’re best and that, as the slightly (OK, much more than slightly) more eloquent Charlotte Brontë put it, “Crying is not a sign of weakness. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you’re alive.”
