When I was in the midst of one of my low points of my latest funk, I was sitting there in my room feeling crappy and alone and helpless and that my life was shit and going nowhere, and there was a part of me the felt like perhaps some tears were necessary. I was by myself and there would be no shame in shedding tears in front of nobody, and frankly I thought that it might be therapeutic or something like that. So I’m sitting there, and trying to manipulate my emotions to where I’d be sad enough for the faucets to start dripping.
They didn’t. They never came.
A long time ago, when I was like 14 or 15, I was pretty involved with my church. Obviously it all changed when I got my driver’s license, became disenchanted with the bullshit hypocrisy of the people I went to church with, and grew tired of how superficial and petty people were in a place where acceptance was quite literally preached.
But anyway, for like two years or so, I went on various retreats and church functions with the youth group, and actually didn’t mind a lot of them, in spite of how lame I thought church functions generally were. Despite the clique-like nature of the youth group based on where you went to school, everyone was pretty civil, friendly and there was a decent sense of camaraderie amongst everyone. I typically had a resentment for most other Koreans at this time due to how arrogantly exclusive they acted, and how often times they showed distain for me for being so white-washed, but I also naively thought that being in a church setting should inherently tone down a lot of this jingoism.
A lot of people don’t know this about me, since I don’t really bring it up, nor believe that it’s at all that important, but I’m a baptized and confirmed Catholic. I don’t know if that has any significance to anyone, or if that makes me more or less Catholic than other Catholics, but that is the extent of my Catholicism.
Anyway, one of these retreats was one of the prerequisite trips necessary for us teenagers to become confirmed. I don’t remember a whole lot of it, except I had sprained my ankle horribly prior to the trip at a basketball camp, and a wasp stung the same foot attached to the gimpy ankle on the trip, but there was a lot of down time, and I spent an inordinate amount of time hiding in my shared room on my comfortable bed enjoy the mountain air through open windows.
The last night of the retreat, there was a sermon or a prepared speech given to us as a group. Contextually, I can’t recollect a lot of the details about it, but somewhere at the end, was along the lines of letting go of everything. And before I knew it, everyone in the entire fucking room started bawling and crying, and I do mean absolutely everyone – except for me. Seriously, there were like 40 Korean teenagers all crying their eyes out and hugging each other, and then there’s me occasionally hugging people who come up to me, but eyes dryer than the Sahara desert.
I really didn’t understand what was going on, or what was going on in the heads of these people’s heads to where the tears seemed to come so easily from. Perhaps I hadn’t seen nearly the number of Korean dramas that my peers may have, to have learned this skill of unleashing tears on command like that, or there was something substantially different about my brain that couldn’t do what these guys were all doing.
Needless to say, it was kind of an awkward moment for me in general, but served to be one of those moments where I realize that tears don’t really come that easily for me.
Not to say that I’m completely devoid of tears outright, far from it. I bawled like a baby when we had to put Nikki to sleep. I shed tears reading Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie. I even got watery eyed during the conclusion of the last episode of The Golden Girls. It’s just that when I think that they’d be convenient to let loose, during times of actual, real, sad instances, like when I’m feeling miserable about my life, I just can’t seem to do it.
And then I think about how there’s probably a world of liberation just waiting behind the dam, like Edward Norton’s salvation in Fight Club if I could ever just manage to cry real tears.
