Crying Out Loud By Lydia L. Denworth
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It happens when you fight with your parents, flunk a test, fall in love. Suddenly you're gasping and gulping; your eyes are flooding over. Why do we cry-and what are tears, anyway?
Maybe this sounds familiar. I'm standing in the door of the biology Iab, trying to explain to my teacher why she should let me wait a day to take a makeup test, but instead of delivering the eminently reasonable argument I'd planned out on the way to school, I'm crying, really bawling. Tears are streaming down my cheeks, hiccupy breaths are starting, I need to blow my nose. I'm dying of embarrassment, and my biology teacher is just staring at me pityingly.
Once again I was crying just when I wanted to be stoic. What happened was that I had to ask for a makeup test because I'd been out sick. I wanted to take it the next day and she wanted me to take it that afternoon, sandwiched between French and modern European history, with no free period for cramming beforehand. Taking it that afternoon would al most certainly mean blowing my average severely. I stood there staring at the blowups of frogs and charts of the nervous system, and instead of explaining why she should see it my way, I cried.
I thought, Oh, please, not here in front of her! I wished I could wait until I was alone to cry. I wished I'd studied the night before. I wished I'd taken chemistry instead of biology. I was frustrated that she wasn't more understanding, because I was usually pretty diligent. I was mortified by the tears, but I couldn't stop them. They just kept coming.
Although I didn't think so at the time, crying is a natural reaction to mean-spirited biology teachers as well as great compliments, sappy greeting-card commercials, and fights with your best friend. Almost anything happy or sad can make you Cry' Fifteen-year-old Kelly Dixon of Geneva, Illinois, says she cries mostly out of frustration. For Colleen Kavanaugh, eighteen, of Martinsville, New Jersey, tears come when "I see something happening to somebody that I can't do anything to stop." And sixteen-year-old Frances Herrod of Oklahoma City says she cried a lot at her grandfather's funeral: "I let out all the pain, and I was able to accept that now he was in a better place and he wasn't going to hurt anymore." Tears are our most basic form of communication. Babies, for example, have no other way of letting Mom and Dad know when they're unhappy or when they need something-food, a clean diaper, a burp.
(And studies show that regularly picking up an infant when it cries creates quieter, happier children-not spoiled brats.) Tears are vital to our well-being even after we can talk, too-they have to be or we wouldn't have the ability to shed them.
The father of the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin, theorized that only functions necessary for survival remain in animals as they evolve. We humans are the most advanced of all creatures, and we're the only ones who can cry emotional tears. It makes us special.
No one is entirely certain what makes us cry, but William Frey, Ph.D., director of the Ramsey Dry Eye and Tear Research Center, in St. Paul, believes that tears may help reduce stress in the body and that we feel better afterward because we have regained our hormonal balance. He has even identified some of the proteins in tears as the same ones-prolactin and ACTH-that build up in our bodies when we're under stress. He thinks it's these chemicals that stimulate the production of tears.
Human beings actually cry two kinds of tears: irritant (caused by things like dust and onion vapors) and emotional (brought on by events like death and breakups). Dr. Frey proved the two were different by collecting subjects' tears after they watched sad movies-Brian's Song and The Champ were the most effective-and after they were exposed to freshly chopped onions. He found that emotional tears contain 24 percent more protein than irritant tears.
Dr. Frey also found differences in who cries the most when. It may not be shocking news that women cry emotional tears more of ten than men (5.3 times a month compared to 1.4); what's interesting are the reasons why: Dr. Frey believes it has to do with hormones. Prolactin-one of the chemicals he found in tears-is also the hormone responsible for the ability to produce breast milk. Naturally higher levels in women (adult women have 60 percent more in their blood than men) might mean that prolactin builds up more quickly in us when we're under stress. Boys cry as much as girls until age twelve, but between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, as girls start producing more prolactin, they cry four times mare of ten than boys.
Women's more frequent tears are also a reflection of a society that allows us to show more emotion than men. New Yorker Owen Ellison, fifteen, can't remember the last time he cried. "Mostly I get really upset out of frustration," he says. "Then I'll get angry and kick something, but I don't cry." No one ever to Id Owen he couldn't cry because he was a guy, but he definitely sees a difference in what's acceptable behavior for girls and for boys. "The girls I know cry a lot, and over kind of stupid things," he says. "I think it grows out of watching what other people do. A girl sees that her sister is crying, so she thinks it's okay to cry. Guys see that their fathers don't cry, their brothers don't cry, so they respond differently than girls."
Girls may have more freedom to cry than guys, but they aren't always glad about it when it happens. Ever since the first day of first grade I 've understood the stigma that criers suffer. There I was, clinging desperately to my mother, bawling in front of all my new classmates. I was trying to tell my mother, If you leave me here, I will die! But my mother knew I'd live to see second grade even if she left me there. So, of course, she did. When the day finally ended and I was making my escape, my teacher called out, "We'll have no mare crying tomorrow, right?" It doesn't take much to upset a five-year-old: I was devastated and utterly embarrassed. And my classmates taunted me for years. I was forever labeled a "crybaby"-a name that immediately brings to mind weakness and childishness.
The frustrating fact of the matter is that although some people do cry more of ten others, it's not because they're weak. Some can control their tears; others can't. Researchers have found a stunning range of normal" crying behaviors. Sometimes you go through huge traumas and never shed a tear; sometimes little things make you sob uncontrollably (which happens an average of once every eleven crying bouts). Some women cry only once in weeks, others twenty-nine days in one month-and both are normal. Dr. Frey believes that people who are keenly aware of their feelings generally experience things too closely to squelch their tears.
Whether or not you can wait until you're by yourself to cry is to some extent the luck of the biological draw. If you can hold out, you'll limit the embarrassment you suffer at the hands of hardened noncriers, but it won't make the need to cry go away. When you get that teary feeling, that lump in your throat, it can overwhelm you. Your eyes water, your face flushes, your lips tremble. You might successfully maintain your poise, but it's never easy.
When it's really the wrong time, concentrated effort may help keep the tears away. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Ivanovich of Watsonville, California, successfully held back the sobs at the county spelling bee last year. "I did the worst I'd ever done," she explains. "I missed on a word I knew. I wanted to cry so much, and 1 had to keep my eyes open so I wouldn't. I was afraid everyone would think I couldn't take the pressure." When Frances Herrod wants to keep from crying, she runs around the block. For some people, pushing upsetting thoughts to the back of their mind helps.
A lot of people have the opposite problem-they can't cry even when they really want to. Says Elizabeth: "Sometimes I feel the teary feeling coming up. I want to cry and it will not come out, it just won't. I feel the sort of shaky feeling, I think my eyes are going to tear up, and I'm thinking, Cry, do something, this is horrible." And Frances says she sometimes thinks if she doesn't cry, doesn't get her feelings out, she'll do something destructive.
There is some scientific proof backing up Frances's theory. Margaret Crepeau, Ph.D., a psychotherapist practicing in Milwaukee, conducted a study that showed that people who think crying is a bad thing and won't allow themselves to do it have a significantly higher rate of stress-related internal disorders like ulcers and colitis than those who cry easily.
There are a relatively few unlucky souls who cry much too easily-they suffer from a genuine physical ailment. Dry eye, or hyposecretion, is a painful condition that keeps you from producing tears and leaves eyes unlubricated and unprotected. The opposite problem, hypersecretion, results in an overflow of tears.
For most of us, though, tears are simply a welcome, much-needed release. After a big argument with her parents, Georgiana Graves, fifteen, of Gainesville, Florida, holds a crying session. "I don't think you should hold the crying in," she says. "I go to my room when there's nobody here, and I just cry and scream and it makes me feel a lot better." "After you cry, your brain doesn't feel as clogged up," says Elizabeth. "It's sort of a catharsis."
Crying is a basic way of letting others know we're hurting when we can't coherently voice our feelings. As babies, we learn that crying gets results-and as we grow up tears come to us when we feel overwhelmed; tears give form to abstract emotions like unfairness and frustration. There are lots of stereotypes about women "using" tears to get their way, but few of us do it intentionally. Watching a young child screaming for attention in a restaurant, you probably think, How obnoxious! But sometimes when, say, you don't know how to convince your boyfriend that the two of you really do make a great couple, you might let out some tears prematurely. As long as you don't succumb to the girl who-cried-wolf syndrome, that's okay. Crying elicits help and comfort from people, which isn't such a bad thing.
Tears, whether happy, sad, welcome, humiliating--even sometimes a little premeditated-are a healthy and natural reaction to events in our lives. Maybe all biology teachers, first graders, employers, and parents should take Mr. Bumble's advice in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist: Crying "opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper. So cry away."
Source: Seventeen Magazine
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