E is for Expressing Emotion

Oh, I wrote my previous E and D posts. They just never made it up onto this blog. Either written in my journal or in "unfinished" posts, they were done enough for me but not enough for public. Except all three were done in a manner that I eventually decided wasn't meant for public, that the need was to write them at all. 

Also, in case this wasn't clear. I'm trans, FAAB, and will refer to my youth as a girl and my present existence that isn't binary.

I hate crying in public. Not to say I haven't ever shed tears in public, after all, how would I realize I hated it if I had no experience with it? I hate crying in public but I've certainly done my share of it. Hell, I spent my last semester of high school crying almost every day through class. Or before class. Or after. Yeah, lot of tears then. A lot of tears that summer too. Tears from stress, tears from pain, and especially tears of heartbreak.

I never used to cry in movies. I was one of three girls in my seventh grade class who didn't cry when we were taken to see a (truly bad) movie that involved some pretty gruesome and depressing deaths. I just found the movie tedious and badly done. I never cried at/in a movie until I was 18. And that movie I went to see alone. Opening night, I sat in the theater, surrounded by strangers, glad that no one I knew could look over in the dark and see the tears on my cheeks. Outside of the movies, I cried far too easily. I cried when people yelled. Not because of any particular emotional response actually, just a side-effect of the way I grew up. Despite being good at handling pain and fear, they still made me cry. And tears made me feel weak.

I don't cry much anymore.

Tears don't come to my eyes. They haven't in the last three plus years since I started testosterone. My emotions express themselves without tears falling from my eyes and it is a massive relief. Pain can lace my face, fear or hurt lining my eyes without a tear falling. Shaking, trembling, shouting, whispering, I can chose my preferred methods of expression. Excepting movies.

At first, I thought it was just that the Star Trek reboot movie happened to have incredibly powerful emotional associations (to events that some of my closest friends are still coping with PTSD over.) Until I realized that the tears sprang to my eyes and my throat closed up at more and more movies. Films done right induce massive swells of emotion. Music and lighting can evoke so much, even when I don't give a shit about the characters. Maybe it's the bombast, or the sudden silence startling you into the realization of how much something has gone wrong... but movies bring tears to my eyes all the damn time.

Each time my throat closes up, each time my eyes start leaking, it hurts. It doesn't hurt in the sense that I'm in emotional pain and this is some of that pain leaking out, it hurts in that I am out of control.

Every tear is an ordeal.

I cannot control it. I do not always understand it. I am stripped of control and the masks I have so carefully constructed. I am stripped of defense and the armor of pleasant amusement that I have cultivated as my default expression. I am at a loss as to why I'm crying. I'm not brought to tears from a powerful scene exactly. It isn't the gut wrenching, knife twisting, moments that tend to do it. I'm just as likely to cry at a overly bombastic ridiculous action sequence as a class Joss Whedon tear-your-heart-out-and-chop-because-he-lives-on-the-tears-of-his-fans moment.

Every tear is an ordeal.

It may be witnessed if I'm watching something in public. It may be a private ordeal, alone in my room before I fall asleep. I cannot let the moment rest. I can't let it just be. And maybe that's why it keeps happening. I cannot let it rest until I understand, and I have yet to understand it. Maybe I'm supposed to be learning a lesson and failing.

Every tear is an ordeal.

One that I don't understand. I don't know what I'm supposed to be learning. Maybe even just to be more open and expressive. Maybe to let things be. I don't know. And, maybe there is no point. It isn't that I'm insisting that this comes from Someone. That this is because of Something. That this ordeal must be caused by the Universe for some purpose. I can learn something without all of that.

Not every ordeal is set up for you, not every ordeal is expected. Not everything is a path set before you, sometimes you trip and fall on your face, and end up breaking three ribs. Those random accidents, those genuine coincidences? Those can be ordeal too. The difference is in how you look at them. So, I chose this path.

I chose to make each tear an ordeal.

The alternative is for it to mean nothing. I've been an existentialist for longer than I can remember. The fact is, in the long run, none of it matters. Which is why all of it matters to me. Every tear, every tremor of my body, every coursing stream of self-hatred I feel as another tear slides down my cheek is of meaning to me. I inscribe each tear into my body and mind. I ask why. I search for meaning, for cause.

And so far, I've failed this ordeal. And that is okay too.