happy tears.
Jan. 29th, 2015 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moominmollyI forgot about livejournal for a while there. I still love this place. If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments; catching up is hard and seems impossible.
So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.
It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.
She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.
And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.
So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.
So, N is 9. Very 9. 9 all over the place. She has crushes. Her body is starting to change. She's still full of ideas and plans and jokes, but I can see her adult self beginning to poke out here and there; I can't quite say why it makes me teary-eyed, but it does. It's sort of like staring the beauty of the universe straight in the face - I flinch.
It's not that she herself is beautiful (though she is), or that I am nostalgic for when she was littler and I could scoop her up and make the world stop (though I am) - it's that I am beginning to see so clearly the passage of time and the cycles in it. I see that this is who I will be ceding the world to, just as my parents did to me.
She commented recently that she didn't understand "happy tears". Tears, yes! Happiness, of course. Emotions too big to contain, all the time. But she does not get why an excess of happiness makes adults cry. And I'm thinking - when are the times that happiness makes me cry? I think they're all inflection points and times of transition. It's change. Change makes me cry: weddings, divorces, coming-of-age narratives, funerals. Watching someone step into their own power. A child growing up. A friend, drifted away.
And maybe change makes me cry as an adult, but didn't as a kid, because every change has a bit of loss in it, even good ones. And loss changes shape as you get older.
So I don't know. Sometimes, when she asks me a complicated question, I'm able to knock it out of the park. And sometimes I flounder. I'm quite certain I did not manage to convey in any way why adults cry when they're happy sometimes. But I haven't been able to shake the question, either. And I keep coming back to: I don't know, kid, but some day maybe you can figure it out and tell me.
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Date: 2015-01-29 07:51 pm (UTC)I've always cried (what I thought to be) relatively easily, and I used to be super ashamed of it. Like, I'd fall down and WTF, self? I'm not even hurt? WHY THE TEARS?!? Of course, shame and surprise are emotions, and my attempt to suppress them would only make them grow, so looking back it seems pretty explainable. Eventually once I got therapy and learned to be better in touch with my emotions, my capacity for them got bigger, and I could just feel them rather than be overwhelmed by them.
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Date: 2015-01-29 08:03 pm (UTC)I don't think this always happens with happy tears, but I think sometimes when an old pain is replaced by a new happy, the tears are from the old pain -- crying in relief, now that the pain is discharged.
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Date: 2015-01-29 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 08:15 pm (UTC)*thinky*
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Date: 2015-01-29 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-29 11:08 pm (UTC)I grok 'happy tears'. They happen when the Happy is so huge and great that it can't possibly be contained and spills out. Sometimes it's in the form of laughter and sometimes it's in the form of tears and sometimes it's both.
Someday, I should tell you about the 'chocolate bunny smile'. It's a concept better described in person, or I would tell it here.
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Date: 2015-01-30 01:13 am (UTC)I actually get Happy Tears when I dance alone for the joy of it. I think tears are a way of releasing stresses you didn't know you were suffering under.
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Date: 2015-01-30 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 01:31 am (UTC)I guess this is my long way of saying that although I had seen adults cry Happy Tears, and had them explained to me, they seemed foreign and strange to me, all the way up until the day I (with some embarrassment) experienced them myself.
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Date: 2015-01-30 02:30 am (UTC)(And thank god I live in a world where it is inevitable, or very nearly, that someday my child will be nine.)
I've been trying to write more here, so there are three posts from the last week or so.
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Date: 2015-01-30 03:14 am (UTC)P.S. "If you've written sometihng interesting, recently, please link me to it in comments" - I'm not good at knowing that posts of mine others would find interesting.
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Date: 2015-01-30 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-30 08:57 am (UTC)I'm still at the same job after more than five years. Sometime I'll tell you how I actually feel about it, but I can't afford to smash the furniture.
We cry for joy because we think of everyone that cannot be there to join us in that moment. I cry when I finish a circuit and realize I finally have something I could have shared with my maternal grampa.
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Date: 2015-01-30 07:01 pm (UTC)We cry for joy because we think of everyone that cannot be there to join us in that moment.
Oh man, if that were true for me I would be a 24/7 weepfest.
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Date: 2015-01-31 12:32 am (UTC)I am not usually a big crier...
but there are somethings that trigger it.
Inexplicably happy. I think that might be where the term "overjoyed" comes from.
... and when I am really pissed off! That one is far more frustrating! If I am pissed as hell at someone, why am I the one crying?
no subject
Date: 2015-01-31 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 06:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-31 05:01 pm (UTC)On the subject of happy tears, my thought on it is related to your comment about change. But I think for me it's not so much that every change has a bit of loss in it as much as it is that for the big happy moments with my kids, there's a bit of "this is the last time this happy thing is going to happen" - the school my kids are in only goes to third grade, so every time she does something that's an annual event at her school, it's the last time she gets to do it. So I can be happy about her carrying the third grade banner at Christmas Chapel, but also realize that it's her last Christmas Chapel.
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Date: 2015-01-31 06:46 pm (UTC)http://gentlescholar.livejournal.com/1689759.html
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Date: 2015-02-03 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 08:57 pm (UTC)Now that I'm much less depressed and reading through people's old entries. Hi! I'm quitting grad school.