When It's Okay To Cry

I think it’s okay to cry when you realize how good someone is. When the realization of someone’s brilliance unexpectedly comes into focus out of nowhere, really, and you’re unable to consider anything else except the fact that you can’t believe their intentions are so adorable and clean, that you can hardly comprehend how the human being in question even exists in this world of so many shitty human beings. When the reality or bird’s-eye view of a person is at once a tangible albeit fleeting concept of warmth and Everything.

Likewise it’s perfectly reasonable to cry when you’ve realized something inside you has fundamentally changed. Like everyone, you run on this functional sort of autopilot, one that allows you to emote on an immediate basis but is rarely privy to larger behavioral and mental patterns. As a consequence, you may live much of your life effectively building up certain unconscious conclusions, perceptions and unrecognizable patterns until one day something abstractly connected to all that occurs and it’s suddenly bitingly clear and totally obvious that you’re actually not in love anymore, and that you are now in fact completely alone and out of your comfort zone. I think the loneliness and fear this position affords is an okay reason to cry.

I think it’s also okay to cry when you realize how alone you really are. When you realize both the gravity and tragedy of the concept that every person on the planet is at a fundamental and unforgivable level alone. That you will die alone and that what exists after you die is nothing.

On a similar note it seems okay to cry over something you’ve lost and will never get back. It’s totally okay to cry about this, to cry when the universe arrives uninvited and sticks its fat hand into your life and unapologetically takes something away from you in a shocking display of coldness and unaccountability, something that you’ll never get back. Something whose absence is, just like the color of the sky, a simple, neutral, inarguable fact of life.

It seems okay to cry at home, beside your friend, after a long day that was primarily composed of a string of mini, soul-grating events, not events of a dramatic life-changing nature, but events like waking up with a hangover and finding that all your clothes hanging to dry are still wet, and so being forced to wear wet clothes to work, and at work finding that your co-worker’s called in sick, which leaves you with an incredibly stressful and busy day ahead of you, so stressful and busy that you don’t even get lunch, and that you fuck up numerous times, and that you accidentally snap at your girlfriend, who fails to see that you’re just extremely busy and stressed and instead takes it as a personal affront but you basically have to hang up on her because currently the amount of work you have to do is like this massive freight train just rolling; events that just seemed to reinforce the frustrating notion that today the universe actually hated you, and the people you had to deal with were unrelentingly adversarial and angular, or at least they all for some reason seemed to have coordinated today to be the day that they’d just have no empathy whatsoever for your growing sense of exasperation and simple desire to be home literally holding hot chocolate in your hands and resting your nose above its brim – that they’d all choose today to have absolutely no time for extra considerations and the fact that your life is hard, too, and that you honestly want to be a child again, in your actual childhood home, in the distinctly-smelling basement next to a space heater with a blanket around your shoulders eating graham crackers while contentedly watching your dad play video games, one of the smallest and safest people on the planet.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.