I Forgot How to Cry

I Forgot How to Cry

By [shahjhan]

There was a time when I cried all the time. As a child, my tears came as naturally as breath. I cried when I lost toys, when I scraped my knees, when someone said something unkind on the playground. My feelings moved like rivers—unapologetically, sometimes violently—but always with motion.

Now?

Now my feelings don’t move. They sit.

They sit like stale water in an untouched glass, dust collecting at the rim. I don't know when the change happened. I just know one day I blinked and realized my face hadn't been wet in years—not from rain, not from grief, not even from joy.

And it's not like life stopped handing me reasons.

I buried my grandmother with a dry face.

I lost a friend to a car accident and said nothing at the funeral.

I got my heart broken slowly—one text at a time—and never once let the pain breach the dam.

I laughed at myself for it, called it strength. Told others, "I'm just not emotional."

But the truth was, I missed it. I missed the release. I missed that trembling, embarrassing, beautifully human unraveling.

I missed the ache of feeling.

---

The first time I noticed something was wrong, I was at a movie theater. It was one of those coming-of-age films, soft and sentimental. The girl in the movie said goodbye to her mother, and the music swelled—just the kind of moment that should’ve wrecked me. I looked around. Everyone was sniffling, wiping their cheeks.

I just sat there.

Unmoved. Not cold—just... distant. Like watching someone else’s dream from behind a glass wall.

That night, I stood in front of the mirror and tried to make myself cry. I thought of my mother, aging quietly. I thought of the voicemail from my ex I never deleted. I thought of the version of myself I’d lost.

I even tried the old trick—cutting onions.

Nothing.

---

My therapist called it "emotional shutdown." Said sometimes the brain, in its clumsy attempt to protect us, starts turning the volume down on our inner world. Not because we don’t care, but because we care too much.

“We desensitize ourselves,” she said gently, “so we don’t drown.”

But surviving isn’t the same as living.

---

It was a Tuesday evening in March when something shifted. I was walking home from work, exhausted, mentally frayed, when I passed an older man sitting on a park bench. He had a dog with him—an aging golden retriever with cloudy eyes and slow limbs. The man fed the dog little pieces of sandwich, whispering to it with care, like a parent talking to a child.

I don’t know why it hit me.

Maybe it was the tenderness.

Maybe I saw the end coming for that dog before the man did.

Maybe it just caught me off guard.

But as I passed them, my throat tightened. My pace slowed.

And just like that—there it was.

A single tear. Just one.

It rolled down my cheek, hesitant and unfamiliar.

And I stopped walking.

---

It didn’t fix everything. It didn’t cure the numbness. But it was something. It was proof.

Proof that I could still feel.

That somewhere under the years of emotional armor, my soul was still intact. Bruised, maybe. But not broken.

---

Since then, it’s come back slowly, like learning a forgotten language. I cry now, sometimes in small doses—during sad songs, in the shower, at night when the silence feels too loud.

And I let it happen.

I no longer apologize for it. I no longer confuse numbness with resilience. Because strength isn’t the absence of emotion—it’s the courage to sit with it.

Even when it’s inconvenient.

Even when it hurts.

Especially when it hurts.

---

I forgot how to cry.

But my tears remembered me.

And when they returned, they brought with them a piece of myself I thought I had lost forever.

---

Author's Note:

If you’ve forgotten how to cry, you're not broken. You're coping. You’re surviving. And someday, when it’s safe, your soul might let the water rise again.

And when it does—let it.