I got into a car accident on the way home from work today. I was merely rear-ended. There was barely a scratch on my car. Unfortunately, even though I made it evident to everyone that I was fine and I was not going to be filing a claim, I was forced to stick around for over an hour while various officials arrived in staggered succession to take down phone numbers, addresses, our recollection of the events as they unfolded. Traffic came to a crawl around us (there were three cars involved and the collision behind me was, sad to say, a smoldering sight to behold), as cars were forced to maneuver around the accident scene.

The car that rear-ended me was transporting a family that had just arrived from Florida — two sisters in their mid-40s, a young teenaged girl, and two kids, barely old enough to fall outside of the “toddler” category. Both of these kids were in near hysterics as they stood on the curb with their moms, while cops swarmed all over their burgundy minivan. They were swaddled in soothing voices — “everything is ok, no one is hurt, you’re fine, everything’s going to be just fine” — as the mothers pulled each of their faces into their breasts, to shield them from the sight of their mutilated van, as well as the shrill sound of drivers ceding to oncoming pandemonium. But the children refused to be mollified: “But you’re not ok; I want to go back home; where’s Daddy? I want to go back to Florida; I hate Chicago; see, I’m getting mosquito bites!” were among the tearful lamentations I managed to piece together while checking my email and swatting away bugs. I saw the bare shoulders of the mothers relax a bit at that last — if the kids were wailing over bug bites, they were crying merely to cry— not because they were still frightened by the afternoon’s events.

After repeatedly assuring both the police officers and the paramedics that I was waiving and releasing anything and everything, I was finally permitted to leave the scene and drive the 3.4 minutes remaining in what was supposed to have been a 40 minute commute home (as opposed to the 173 minute commute home).

As I pulled away from the scene, I was seized with an inexplicable but inexorable urge to sob. I could see the knuckles on top of the steering wheel were turning white as my fingers started to clamp. My body started caving in on itself, even while I was driving, as it instinctively went into “hide and survive” mode, sensing some sort of as yet unidentified predator from my anxiety. I could feel my cheekbones jutting out of my face as I clenched my jaw in an effort to reinforce the dam that was holding back what I knew was a flood of irrational tears.

And there was a moment where I stood on the precipice,
the ledge from which I could dive into the crushing but cathartic opiate of
emotional crack — and I chose not to.

I ground my teeth, took a deep breath, cocked my head a bit until I heard my neck crack and just kept driving, my eyes trained steadily on the sun that was setting gloriously over the fleet of private jets parked in the airport near my home. Yes, it could have been far worse and a whole lot of people could have gotten hurt, but they didn’t and so I didn’t need to cry. It occurred to me that too many people, all my life, had told me that it was brave to cry, that it took courage to share my pathos so openly, that my propensity to dissolve into tears was evidence of my depth and profundity, my passion.

But the truth was, I too was guilty of crying over mosquito bites.

I am 32 years old and things have not always been easy. The only man I’ve ever loved in my entire life has clawed desperately at every particle of my self worth until I hated myself almost as much as he hated me. For 13 years, I feel like I’ve been living inside of my closet because every time I try and step out of it, at some point, he will chase me down and remind me that I am worth nothing more than a pair of old shoes or jeans, perhaps even less, and that my world and universe should and always be contained within the four walls of that closet. No amount of therapy or counseling or sleeping pills or vodka is ever going to erase this history, this narrative.

And I have cried. I have cried until my tear ducts were raw, my eyelids were burned, my hands began to shrivel, my lips began to crack, until I became a desert, bare of all hope of joy.

There is a part of me that will always be on that precipice, that ledge, and all it would take is one solid poke in the back to have me tumbling down into a haze of self-pity. Because that is what it is: self-pity, that horrible contemptible and detestable monarch of all emotional indulgences.

At some point, I need to peel myself off the concrete, and keep walking.
I can’t do that if I’m too busy crying.

It does take courage to face up to the reality of one’s pain, to surrender to it, and validate it with tears. But, I would much rather my courage be defined not by the tears that track down my face, but by the footsteps I leave behind me, as I continue to walk, one thundering step at a time outside that fucking closet.