We’re brainwashed with garbage idioms like “Big girls don’t cry.” Guys who “cry like a girl” are told to “man up.” Or “She’s crying like a baby,” as if only babies have a reason to cry, which makes no sense to me, given babies have the fewest problems out of all of us. They don’t have mortgages or jury duty, and they get the fun end of the whole birthing situation. The mother is the one who is pushing and bleeding and tearing, and the baby basically just gets to jet down a water slide. I think the ole “crying like a baby” idiom should be reversed: What we should say about babies is “Jesus, that baby is crying like a grown-up!”
The sessions with Evelyn were very uncomfortable at first. She had me get naked save my (granny) panties. I immediately apologized for those. Then I apologized for apologizing for them. By then she just ignored my apologies and moved on to staring at my feet for a ridiculously long time, which made me squirm due to how ugly I think my feet are. I mean, Western European people evolved to run from bears and balance on glaciers, not to be foot models. Seriously, I don’t know if it’s my Viking DNA or my mom’s GMO-laced breast milk, but my feet look like a basket of french fries. To make things worse, I had fallen in love with a pair of New Balance shoes with Velcro straps a couple weeks prior, but they had only a size 9.5, and I’m a size 10 when I’m not bloated. That didn’t stop me from buying and wearing them so much that one of my toenails straight-up fell off one night when I was onstage. I painted over it with nail polish, thinking nobody would notice. Right as I was about to trick people into thinking I had ten toenails, I made the blunderous choice of red polish, making my toe look like a Craisin.
I lay down on a padded table and Evelyn proceeded to beat the living shit out of me with one finger. Usually if someone is using one finger on you, it feels awesome, but this was literally an intolerable amount of pain. Now I know what they mean by the adage “location, location, location.”
Evelyn jammed her finger into the side of my hip, the back of my shoulder, and the area between my jaw and ear because she discovered that’s where I hold my tension and repressed emotional pain. She explained that since our bodies react to stress faster than our brains can, our bodies will tense when a situation reminds it of a previous trauma, which signals the brain to release the stress chemicals adrenaline and cortisol, which is what makes us feel anxious. Her goal is to neutralize these areas so your body halts that reaction cycle and you stop turning every benign situation into a fight-or-flight scenario. For example, when you’re at the grocery store and someone leaves her cart in the middle of the aisle, you don’t feel the need to end their life because of that time you got left in the car too long as a kid. This practice can also help you stop making every guy you date your dad and every girl you date your mom, because unlike what the popularity of MILF porn may indicate, that’s not a cute look on anyone.
Evelyn taught me that crying is a healthy release and should be a part of our daily lives since we have so much repressed pain stored up in our bodies from our past. As corny as it sounds, I took with me the expression “You gotta feel it to heal it.” When we repress our feelings, they build up and will eventually explode in random situations or end up getting expressed in unhealthy ways, like addictive compulsions, self-sabotage, or general assholery. Another adage that’s always stuck with me is “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” So when I suppress my feelings today, I know that it’s a negative contribution to my future because it’s eventually going to cause an inappropriate reaction where the punishment does not fit the crime. If I don’t cry when my body and brain want to cry, you better believe that in two years when a form at a doctor’s office innocently asks for my relationship status, I’ll internalize it as a personal attack and have a full-on tantrum.
Today, crying is a part of my routine to maintain emotional equilibrium. We all carry a lot of grief around, and there’s so much sadness in the world that we empathically take on but don’t have the time to release on a daily basis. I look at crying like cleaning the lint out of the dryer before using it again so it can function better. I try to make crying a routine maintenance thing like vacuuming, emptying the garbage, or masturbating. But maybe don’t cry and masturbate at the same time, because if the CIA really is watching us though our computer cameras, that footage is seriously going to thwart your political ambitions.
Crystal Balls
Look, I don’t not believe in psychics. My theory is that they aren’t necessarily divinely clairvoyant, but that they’re just some of the few people that actually listen when someone else talks. Suppose I say, “The thing about James is, well, I don’t know, he’s just like . . . I don’t know. You know?” Any truly awake person listening to me can tell that James and I are not going to live happily ever after, given how ambivalent I am when I talk about him. Whenever girls talk about guys with an expression like they just smelled a dead body, it’s pretty clear that they aren’t that into him or there’s some red flag they’re in denial about. So unless your friend has had a shocking amount of work done, it doesn’t take metaphysical witchcraft to figure out what’s going on by her facial expressions. I feel like being psychic might just be the natural result of what happens when you actually just listen to someone without being a distracted spaz plotting your next Instagram post during a conversation.
I go to the same psychic once a year. Again, I’m not sure I believe in psychics, but I do believe in this particular one because much to my chagrin, she has never been wrong. I won’t give you her real name because I’m worried everyone will start booking her and I won’t be able to get an appointment. I didn’t say any of these healers made me stop being selfish, folks. Let’s call her Beatrice. Beatrice’s waiting room is full of lamps that look like rocks and seemingly endless yoga magazines, my least favorite magazine to have to flip through. To me, the only thing more boring than stretching is reading about stretching.