![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/crying.jpg\")
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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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So I\u2019m sitting there, and trying to manipulate my emotions to where I\u2019d be sad enough for the faucets to start dripping.<\/span><\/p>\n They didn\u2019t.\u00a0 They never came.<\/span><\/p>\n A long time ago, when I was like 14 or 15, I was pretty involved with my church.\u00a0 Obviously it all changed when I got my driver\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n But anyway, for like two years or so, I went on various retreats and church functions with the youth group, and actually didn\u2019t mind a lot of them, in spite of how lame I thought church functions generally were.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n A lot of people don\u2019t know this about me, since I don\u2019t really bring it up, nor believe that it\u2019s at all that important, but I\u2019m a baptized and confirmed Catholic.\u00a0 I don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Anyway, one of these retreats was one of the prerequisite trips necessary for us teenagers to become confirmed.\u00a0 I don\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The last night of the retreat, there was a sermon or a prepared speech given to us as a group.\u00a0 Contextually, I can\u2019t recollect a lot of the details about it, but somewhere at the end, was along the lines of letting go of everything.\u00a0 And before I knew it, everyone in the entire fucking room started bawling and crying, and I do mean absolutely everyone \u2013 except for me.\u00a0 Seriously, there were like 40 Korean teenagers all crying their eyes out and hugging each other, and then there\u2019s me occasionally hugging people who come up to me, but eyes dryer than the Sahara desert.<\/span><\/p>\n I really didn\u2019t understand what was going on, or what was going on in the heads of these people\u2019s heads to where the tears seemed to come so easily from.\u00a0 Perhaps I hadn\u2019t 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\u2019t do what these guys were all doing.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t really come that easily for me.<\/span><\/p>\n Not to say that I\u2019m completely devoid of tears outright, far from it.\u00a0 I bawled like a baby when we had to put Nikki to sleep.\u00a0 I shed tears reading Mitch Albom\u2019s\u00a0Tuesdays With Morrie.<\/em>\u00a0I even got watery eyed during the conclusion of the last episode of\u00a0The Golden Girls.<\/em>\u00a0It\u2019s just that when I think that they\u2019d be convenient to let loose, during times of actual, real, sad instances, like when I\u2019m feeling miserable about my life, I just can\u2019t seem to do it.<\/span><\/p>\n And then I think about how there\u2019s probably a world of liberation just waiting behind the dam, like Edward Norton\u2019s salvation in\u00a0Fight Club<\/em>\u00a0if I could ever just manage to cry real tears.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 I was … Continue reading Tears don\u2019t come easy for this cowboy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,129,15,70],"class_list":["post-38310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-angst","tag-nostalgia","tag-og","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38312,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38310\/revisions\/38312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}