I’m Crying Again, and I Don't Want to Stop

I used to cry easily and often, but years of the Trump presidency and antidepressants put a stop to that. I had a last huge cry on the day after the 2016 election, along with many of my students, and then I got to organizing to keep from feeling despair, from feeling too much. Marches, letter-writing campaigns, door-knocking, town-hall events, calls to my reps—the activities kept me afloat, kept me productively enraged. But I felt separate from the tenderest part of myself.

I’m finding that tenderness again (or maybe it’s perimenopause). It means I’ve cried more in the last few months than I did all of 2016-2020. Just in the last two weeks: I got choked up at an awards ceremony describing a student’s stunning and winning poem; I angry-cried over a stupid work situation; my body trembled with tears for an entire day after spending a morning with a man who fled Venezuela because police there killed his son. He was just walking in front of my house, sobbing and cold after spending all night looking for food and shelter, after being turned away at the Canadian border. I’m still crying about him, and hundreds of others like him who wait at the bus stop in Plattsburgh every week for a ticket back to New York, where they are more likely to find work, but not affordable housing.

I’m crying about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which Biden just said is not genocide, and I’m crying about that too—that he won’t say or do what needs to be done to stop the war, and that so many people won’t vote for him because of that. And I’m crying because I’m worried he won’t win, and if he doesn’t win, this is over: a country, a democracy, and my ability to feel things.

I worry that these last four years have only been an island, a little life raft, from which we could bear witness to the depths of devastation around the world but not be drowned by them, not yet. I worry that I have only been able to cry these last four years because the full-range of human emotion has returned to me alongside a President and Vice President who want to protect healthcare for me and my daughter. And I don’t want to stop crying—from anger, sadness, joy, fear and and hope—because the world is worth crying over. It’s worth feeling tender about.