Communal Crying

I have now been living at university for 9 weeks and as probability would have it, that is long enough to have seen a lot of my nine flatmates cry. One day was enough to see eachother crying with laughter, but since then some of us have had various reasons to be crying with things other than laughter. When you’re co-habitating it’s not always an easy activity to execute in private, nor is it always something which is improved by solitude.

Despite being a fairly rare tear shedder myself, I think the world would be a better place if we treated crying in the same way as we do laughter – accept and accommodate it. Don’t see it as something which needs to be stopped or changed. Let people cry for as long as they need to. Though unlike laughter, don’t enter social situations with the explicit intention of making as many people cry as possible. It’s 2018 but there still have to be some rules.

I think the reason most of us still prefer to cry when no one else can see us is because we know we’ll be able to sob until we get it all out of our system without feeling any pressure to draw it prematurely to a close, pretending the person we’re with has managed to cheer us up when actually we don’t need to be made merry or shown the positives at this moment in time. We just need a bloody good cry.

In Junior School if somebody fell over in the playground their friends or a teacher would call me over to do a silly dance so that they’d stop crying and start laughing. Considering everything I have just said, if I could go back in time to those playground moments… I’d still do the exact same because children need to be taught how to stop being pussies and get on with their day. But between adults, I hope the age for shameless crying is dawning.