Sri Izzati Soekarsono
What You Think About When You Think About Crying
Excerpt
Your sadness comes in episodes. It’s erratic, it’s a recurring thing. Also, it’s mostly invisible.
Tonight’s a Friday night, just past nine. You’re a couple of minutes into your weekly Pilates workout. It’s February in New York, so it’s still pretty cold. You’re thankful that your apartment is warm, though sometimes it gets a little bit too warm. There’s something wrong about working out in this particular kind of temperature—the heat only hovers, only brushes you so slightly to make sure you don’t freeze, yet it’s still not warm enough to help you sweat as much as you used to when you worked out back home, in Jakarta, in your favorite fitness studio’s hot rooms. You miss them, the hot rooms. You miss being distracted by how much you decorate your mat with sweat during every workout, because you’re the type of person that needs visual proof to believe you’re making progress. But these days, your mat is usually only slightly damp from the moisture on your body, never drenching wet by the sparkling sweat. Faint prints on your mat in the shape of your back or arms don’t satisfy you as much. Nevertheless, tonight you step onto it and pray for a good exercise, wishing—more than anything—the “happy hormones” endorphins actually live up to their claim.
O
The class is online, sixty minutes long, three times a week. You know the routine by heart. You also know the endorphins should work every time—you’re counting on that. Just the first two minutes of breathwork is usually all it takes to slow time down for you, transport you to a different realm, a space where you’re comfortable enough to shed your vulnerability and actually love being in your own skin. But tonight is different. The instructor is telling you to breathe when you feel it coming: your emotions that are not your own, bubbling up in quicksilver, pushing the insides of your eyes, the bones under them throbbing. All of the sudden you feel flushed and naked and ironic, thinking how your world is flurrying away over the most basic thing, breathing. Inhale with your nose, exhale through your mouth, your instructor says, and following that up is your battered mind saying, cry. That’s how you know everything has reached its breaking point: you start crying even before your tears see it coming. Your hissing exhale ends with a mewl. Suddenly your breath is not yours, your emotions and your body are in a race. What are you doing? Stop crying, continue moving. You are still in your warmups, your palms and your knees are on the mat. Your instructor squeezes in some Intro to Pilates speech between the stretches—there are a couple of first-timers joining that day—so everyone is ten seconds longer in their cat-and-cow. You wonder whether any of them noticed your contorting face earlier—and whether during their cat-and-cow they’re thinking why on earth you already look like you’re in so much pain—or perhaps they don’t see anything. You know that it only makes sense to pay attention to your own little square during Zoom calls, especially Zoom workouts. But tonight, that idea irks you—you want everybody to care that you’re doing passé side planks with tears hanging from your nose and eventually falling to your mat. But they don’t.
Keep your back neutral, keep it one nice line with your spine, your instructor’s voice sounds distant. Scoop your hips in, don’t let your back sink. Now, let’s do two breaths in your child pose…. I’m OK, this is OK, you think as you cat-and-cow. The stretch feels especially good after a long, tiring week. A long, tiring life.
O
This is how your mind wins the race. Your system can’t tell that the only reason your head is on the floor is not because you want it on the floor, nor because you finally give up on life and decide to melt down, but because you’re simply trying not to get injured. But you can be an ass to yourself. You hear another mewl, you’re not sure who made it, but your shoulders start to shake. When your instructor asks the class to bring their bodies back up, suddenly you’re seeing your body from the outside. You manage to get back on your feet, but everything becomes blurry. Your face burns and your right cheek itches. A teardrop has escaped and it runs down, halting for a second just a little bit next to your nose, before it finally drops and sticks to the mat. Physical exercise has been your strategy to make you feel strong and pretty, to overthrow a sad day, but tonight it feels like an overture to a forlorn defeat.
O
Seven years ago, your sister found you crying under a blanket. It was the year of your firsts: first year of college, first time living by yourself, and first time having friends from the Big City with different languages, different jokes, different values. It wasn’t too long until you eventually got offended by their exclusive genre of comedy, and how quickly they got annoyed by you always asking to clarify what you registered as ambiguous remarks. They barked and said hurtful things, and you bottled everything in. Your sister is a psychologist. After listening to your sobbing, she said that when you were feeling sad, you should try and bring your body to an open position. Unfold, untangle, uncurl. Make bigger gestures. Look up and massage your face in a circular, upward motion. You should move, heck if you can you should even dance. It’s called facial-feedback theory, she said. You’re not crying because you’re sad—you’re sad because you’re crying. So don’t cry too much. Don’t succumb. Don’t feed the emotions by accommodating the shape and size they want. Because when your body gives up, your emotions have no way out. Stand up, Sabrina, try smiling if you can. It won’t stop you from being sad, but it will help you feel sad just enough. You’re good with just enough.
O
So you push through. You push through the planks, the nasty plank commandos, the dolphins. But the water droplets on your mat still are not your sweat.
When the class finally gets to the cool-down, your brain starts to calculate whom you should video call right after—it only makes the difference when you’re actually seen rather than just heard. And time is essential. The question is, who could handle your ugly, crying face? Who can handle your irrational fears, your anxiety? Who will tolerate screaming best? Who will say what you want to hear?
Open up your arms, inhale; twist your body to the back, exhale; your instructor cues. Her voice still sounds so far away. Your mind is busy going over imaginary flash cards. Mother. She will listen to you. You do want to make this excruciating phase a part of her experience too: this is what it feels like to have a daughter who’s twenty-five, studying abroad, devastatingly unstable, and wouldn’t hear “pray to God so you can feel better” for an answer. She will definitely tell you to pray to God, so you reconsider.
Now you think about your sister. She loves you, and she does understand you more than Mother. She knows your language. But from that night seven years ago you’ve learned that you were better off not confiding in her anymore. She’d recite that goddamn facial-feedback theory to your sobbing face, and she also would acknowledge your problems like they are those of a little child. That’s why people can’t have their family member as their therapist. So calling her is definitely not an option either.
Inhale, exhale, good God the class is taking forever.
O
From your Islamic upbringing, you learn to control your movements so you can control your actions. If you become angry while standing then sit down. If you’re sitting down and you still feel like you want to hit people in their faces, lie down. If you’re lying down and you can still feel a lump in your chest swelling, your fingers prickling, and throbbing pain radiating to the strangest places like your elbow, your knees, your nose—then take a wudu. Wudu supposedly purifies you. It’s the first step to the daily prayers from which people find solace not just because of the spiritual meaning but also the technicalities of it—you basically splash water all over yourself. It starts with your hands, then your mouth, to your nose. Then you wash your face—best part, in your opinion—before proceeding to your arms, from your fingertips to just a little bit above your elbows. Then run your wet fingers through your hair, stop at your ears and give them a good scrub too, before lastly, you wash your feet. And if all that cleansing and the coolness of the water still don’t soothe you, then your last bet is to actually do a prayer and ask God to calm the raging storm from within.
Find solace through wudu, you add that thought to the queue, but you decide what’s more pressing now is getting done with the crying.
About the Author
Sri Izzati Soekarsono (Izzati) is from Bandung, Indonesia. She is fascinated by humans and their emotions, so she writes about them. In 2019, she started her own writing classes for Indonesian youths and was awarded a scholarship from Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education to pursue her MFA.