Cry Baby: Weaponizing our Emotions
From a young age, I believed my tears would invalidate my strength. By Tanya, 24, London.
Emotions (specifically rage, anger, and frustration) are messy and fluid but can they be a secret weapon for change? Gen Zs think so. They look to people like Serena Williams at the U.S. Open or the women outside Sen. Flake’s office during the Kavanaugh hearing. All of whom, rather than containing themselves, let their tears flow, and it had power. Youth activist Tanya Compas looks at how feelings fuel her political (and personal) resistance.
Tanya, you’re so strong,” is a phrase I have heard throughout my life. It’s a badge that I have been given by friends, family, past partners, and even in my job as a youth worker. It’s one that I have always worn with pride and honor — up until now that is. When you are labelled as strong, it feels like your pass to be vulnerable, to be sad, or to cry gets revoked. To remain “strong,” I’ve suppressed and dismissed my own emotional needs and feelings. The internal dialogue between my head and heart is one in which my head always seems to come on top. “Don’t be a cry baby,” it commands. “Strong people don’t cry. We need you.”
A fluid experience is being a black woman.”-VICTORY, 20, IRELAND/SCOTLAND
Crying is something that seems to be so easy for white women, but something that black women have had to fight against, and for. The same empathy offered to white women is not offered to black women. Our blackness negates our femininity and therefore our right to be emotionally vulnerable in the eyes of society. Out of fear that our emotions will be interpreted as tropes of anger or aggression, we police how we express them everywhere. I do it even in my own home.
I am a fluid, masculine presenting, queer, mixed-race woman born to a white mother and black father. I am the middle of three sisters, and growing up I was considered the “sporty one” and the tomboy. Labels that I now know are intrinsically linked to masculinity and thus, due to the patriarchal and toxic masculine society we live in, further reduced my right to emotional expression.
I was never taught to cry. I was never told it was okay. From a young age, I believed that my tears would invalidate my strength and that in order to maintain my label of “the strong one” and fulfill my role as the protector of my family, I had to negate and repress my own emotions.
“An activist is one that has strong viewpoints and beliefs on a particular subject and is not afraid of expressing them.” -COCO, 18, NEW YORK CITY
This is something that now as a 26-year-old woman, I am beginning to unlearn with the help of therapy. I have learned that, as a black woman, my tears are political. Serena Williams crying on the court at this summer’s U.S Open was political. Without even meaning to, she made a statement. She received backlash and was racially discriminated against for showing her emotions. One Australian newspaper even depicted her as a black, ape-like baby throwing a “cry baby” tantrum on the court. To me it was freeing. She showed me and so many other black women that our emotions matter. If it makes other people uncomfortable, then so be it.
We are not serving ourselves by repressing, suppressing, and dismissing our own emotions. Our tears don’t negate our strength, they reinforce it. They are proof that we are strong enough to know that we are valid, our emotions are valid. We deserve to cry. We need to.
