Don’t Miss This

I like to cry at sad movies. I buy a single ticket. Sit in the dark amongst strangers. Watch something heart wrenching unfold on the screen and cry.

Maybe like is the wrong word. Crying at sad movies is an important experience to me.

There is some truth there, inexorable, in the dark.

I don’t do this for cathartic release.

I don’t do this just to feel something. I feel something all the time. I am always full of feelings.

I do this because for those ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes in the dark this group of strangers is united. We are all feeling the same thing at the same time. We are all caught up in the same story. And we all walk out of that theater different than when we arrived. We all walk out with new truths from the fiction that unfolded before us.

I don’t know if I am more sensitive than most. If I just feel things harder than others.

I know that I cry at everything. Here are some random and strange things that have made me cry over the years. I cried at the commercial when they announced that they invented a feature for minivans so moms with their hands full could wave their foot under their car to open the door. I cried listening to a podcast discuss a fictional character on a TV show from over a decade ago get shot… he was fine and fictional, by the way, and I knew that when I was listening to the podcast. I cry when people I love sing happy birthday. Not to me, but in general, to anyone. I cried overhearing a kind nurse talk a young man through his first blood draw. My brother once insisted I join him and his young son at a hockey game (most professional sports are not at all my cup of tea). I cried when the home team scored and the entire stadium, thousands of people, leapt to their feet and roared in joy. (In that moment I finally understood organized professional sports. The feeling of united, unbridled emotion in the stadium was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.)

Most recently, the strangest thing I cried over was Lando Norris winning the F1 World Driver’s Championship. (This is one professional sport that very much is my cup of tea.)

I don’t even like Lando! (I was rooting for Oscar.) But when he cried having finally achieved his lifelong goal, I cried with him. The tears surprised me. Why am I crying with someone who is halfway across the globe from me, whom I will likely never meet, and whose accomplishment I was actively rooting against?

I cry all the time.

Over everything.

Big or small.

Real or Fiction.

I feel deeply.

And often I seek out this experience on purpose.

I don’t know why I am built this way. I honestly find it a bit strange and a bit much.

Moreover, I don’t have the capacity or the will to hold it back.

I think about emergency workers. Their job is to run into the fire, to run into danger.

I am like that with emotions. I walk towards them as everyone else runs the other way.

In Kim Krans’ the Wild Unknown Archetypes deck it is the job of the Poet archetype to go to the dark places and bring back the truth to share with the world.

This is what I do. That is what I am learning to do.

Not just feel all these feelings so intensely and then bury the experience. But instead share them. Share them with my most intimates. Share them online, here, with all of you. To find what is true among all the feelings.

I walk into the dark, find the light, find a grain of truth, and carry it back out to share. And here is what I am bringing back to you.

Feel this with me.

Sit here in the darkness and cry with me. Sit here in the light and laugh with me. And every emotion in between.

Don’t skip it.

Don’t skip your feelings. Step into it. In a world that is trying so hard to eliminate your humanity. Don’t. Don’t let go of it.

My tears are like that.

Lando Norris’s tears are like that.

Droplets of truth saying:

I’m here.

I am in this moment completely.

I am feeling this.

I’m paying attention.

Are you?