I haven't cried in a year

The last time I cried was the day Kobe died.

I’m not a huge basketball fan, and I certainly have no allegiance to LA or their sports stars. Yet, there I was, sitting across from my brother at a cafe in Fort Greene, halfway through a bagel with cream cheese, as shocked as anyone else in the restaurant to see tears streaming down my face.

It wasn’t really about Kobe.

I’d seen the news earlier and cycled through the usual response of surprise and hushed shock without feeling too personally affected, knowing most conversations that day would start with, “Did you hear about…” It was the revised accounting a little later that named his daughter, Gianna, among the victims that did me in, unlocking all the near-cries I’d stuffed back up my tear ducts for god knows how long.

I don’t remember it feeling that cathartic. I’m sure there was some physical relief, but the overwhelming emotion was embarrassment – embarrassed to be crying in a public place, embarrassed to be unable to communicate what was making me cry, and embarrassed to be crying at all.

Chris La Tray (aka An Irritable Métis), recently raised the question of where this embarrassment over showing emotion comes from and wondered how we might fix it, especially as a growing number of young men are radicalized into a tough guy brotherhood, clinging to their guns and their thin blue lines, unable to process the type of empathy required to not purposefully misconstrue the difference between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.

While it would take nothing short of dismantling the patriarchy in the long run, I think we can get a start on bringing more normalcy to emotional men for current and future generations, and the key is modeling empathy.

For example, we don’t need Stanley Tucci to teach us how to make a Negroni; we need Stanley Tucci (and other men of influence) to cry in front of his sons and our sons. We need to give them the permission to indulge in this basic response and the strength to persist in the face of mockery. We need them to know that what they’re doing is normal and that the bully’s response is the character defect.

I can’t think of any role models given to crying jags. At a time when women are still crossing the thresholds of political office, sports management, and other male-dominated fields, it’s not surprising that my first list of role models was an all-male cast, but that’s also the point. Women have been modeling empathy for generations. Men have been disguising their emotional responses for the same amount of time. As younger generations look up to the people who look like them for clues as to how they should behave, it’s no wonder why this behavior persists.

In a year that’s seen over 400,000 American deaths to the pandemic (and in no small part due to a commander-in-chief who wanted you to think he was an unflinching American badass despite the existence of this picture), we shouldn’t ignore the compounding effect of (not) grieving an incomprehensible amount of friends, neighbors, and countrymen. It’s going to catch up to us – in a coffee shop, during an emotional movie scene, and unfortunately, at more memorial services closer to home – and we need to be ready to let it flow through us when it does.

Why have I cried for Gianna but none of these victims? And what will it take to unlearn masculine conditioning? I think it starts with some tears and continues with sharing the source of the emotion, fighting through the urge to make excuses, and honoring the people and the pain that are part of it.

Next time I feel it coming, I’m gonna let it rip.