Making me cry.
No one will be surprised to read I’m a pretty emotionally dynamic person. Always have been. Things impact my insides, sometimes in ways that taste strange even to me. Emotions, I know, are only as crucial as one makes them. It can be tough for me on some days to let go of emotions that are generating energy drain.
Today’s been a rollercoaster. When so much of your experience looks like it simply must be wonderful it can be tough when, even in the midst of all this cool stuff, you feel a bit lost at sea.
My approaches to attitude adjustment these days are not what they were in the past. Drinking to mute and dilute emotional rampages was an extremely effective coping mechanism. I am now committed to having that NOT be my approach. Not ever again. SO, I do other things when I am suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fuckery. I write, I reach out to friends. I try to process the emotion by turning it up to 11.
Today I’ve wanted to cut loose and scream and cry but that’s kind of tough when you have a train to catch from Gothenberg to Stockholm and then an afternoon outing. Sleepless night be damned. And sometimes, no matter how much you want it, the reassuring voice and touch of the person you most want to hear from isn’t there. The friend to whom you don’t have to explain anything isn’t there. So, you keep on going and finally have a small illusion of privacy and just wanna…cry.
And then you get stuck.
I hate it when I want to cry and can’t. But this is where my weepy-ass has an advantage, because there are some musical shortcuts I can use to spur lachrymal catharsis.
SO, right now, I’m listening to Beck’s cover of Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime, from the soundtrack of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind“ and this one gets me on the level of the song as well as reminding me of the movie, which also made me cry seriously hard.
Zero 7 is another one that permits me to wrap my head around the benefit of tears and Simple Things works pretty well to continue the “let it all hang out” mood.
Rather than trying to drown my emotions and fears and hurts, prickling jealousies, twisting loneliness, limping anger, rather than that, I’ll sit with them in this odd pre-dawn Scandinavian night, and we’ll just…be. We are good. We are breathing.
If I need to roll out the big guns, I do what any smart girl from the ‘hood does and turn to dead Norwegians. They don’t fuck around and Ase’s Death from “Peer Gynt” gets me every time.
Well most times. Unless I happen to get my brain into the memory of listening to it when I was in Oslo visiting Teh Mad Viking a few years back in which case the emofest veers into…well, more explicit memories and different flavors of tears.
And there…the stream of consciousness designed to stream the tears brings me back to remembering life, and sex, and blood and rock-n-roll and that’s a lovely way to bounce out of a dimly-lit mood, no?
What do you listen to to make you cry…?
Schubert’s Mass in G.
Not really because it’s a beautiful piece (because it is). But because it was a piece of serious music we did in High School choir, spent a semester working on it. I had several solos, and it was all-encompassing, my senior year, when I had a hot gf, excellent friends I saw every day, and the whole world ahead of me.
In short, it reminds me of a much simpler time (though at the time it didn’t seem so). It reminds me of an innocence and optimism and the hopes of a 17 year old kid that didn’t quite work out.
Not that I’m saying my current life isn’t all sorts of awesome, yourself included. But it sure isn’t what I planned. And sometimes that other set of dreams and ideals that was lost really can bring on the waterworks, if I let it.
Of course, I’m a Big Dudely Dom, so I had my tear ducts surgically transplanted to my armpits so that I just look more manly when I get emotional.
I like reading about other people crying because I don’t really. Usually once a year or so and it’s a serious effort for me. I try but it doesn’t really happen. It’s an odd and sucky thing.
Kharma Police/Creep Radiohead. The former because that was the song I utilized during most of my suicide ideations when I was younger. So to this day I cry when I hear it because I was so lost then. And Creep because it illustrates a certain time in my life and feelings that it just does.
I watch Braveheart. Works every time. I’m totally serious. :D
Songs that make me cry include:
Holes in the Floor of Heaven
The First Cut is the Deepest…
can’t remember more and have to prevent older child from damaging younger child.
I’ve never mastered more than sniffles. Even at funerals ( my father’s included) I didn’t cry much. Mostly it’s watching other suffer emotionally that gets to me. Even then my first response is often anger because it’s safer. I think the first time in my life that I honestly balled my eyes out was when I went off antidepressants cold turkey. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t sleep ( for over 72 hrs) I just balled. Even when I do manage to cry (sniffles) I get the worst migraines. I know it’s from repression, but I’m still not sure how to purge those emotions. I’ve been hanging onto them for decades.
saddest piece of music ever—-Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”….gets me every single time.