A Guide on How to Cry in the Bathroom
Olivia Xiao (G11)
In this article, Olivia seeks to teach people a way to deal with and express their emotions. With many years’ experience of crying in bathrooms, she believes that the has the necessary knowledge on how to do so successfully. She hopes struggling with personal things in life can read her article and take away a thing or too after reading.
Have you just completely bombed the math test you stayed up into the wee hours of the night studying for? Best friend said something that made you want to actually die? Discord boyfriend of two months dumped you through text? If any of the above (or more) apply to you, don’t worry. I am here to help.
If you’re a weak, lonely, too-sensitive-for-their-own-good person like me, you’ve probably found yourself in this situation all too many times. Tears threatening to spill out of your eyes as you walk from the classroom to the bathroom, staring straight ahead, yet still feeling like every pair of eyes in the world are on you. It’s like you’re the main character having a total mental breakdown in some teen drama. However, this is not actually true! Trust me, nobody is looking at you. Everyone is either chatting with friends, on their phones, or just not looking directly into the eyes of everyone passing by them.
Now once you’ve made it to the bathroom, the worst-case scenario is when it’s full of people talking and laughing and looking in the mirror. And walking by them is Boo Boo the Fool (you) with tears and snot already beginning to stream down your face. Then, of course, they all stop and stare wondering what the hell is wrong with you. An easy solution to this: keep it in! Wearing masks actually helps with this. Once you’ve made it into a stall, you’re safe. Or so you think.
For some people it’s hard to cry quietly. You want to scream and shout and let it all out. Unfortunately for you, it’s not quite acceptable etiquette to do this in a public bathroom. Of course, if it’s all too much and you have no other choice, it’s also fine. Just know that there is a chance the bathroom is not empty, and you’ll give some poor person a heart attack. Or maybe you’re loud enough that you’ll give the entire hallway a heart attack. But if you don’t want to indirectly murder others like this, just learn to cry quietly. It’s not that hard. Sometimes it hurts your throat and chokes you up, but you get used to it.
Once you’ve finished your sobbing session, you exit the bathroom and look at your puffy-eyed, tomato-red face in the mirror. One quick way to deal with this is to wet a paper towel with cold water and place it on your eyes. Or just wait until the puffing goes down before you leave. If you’re like me, someone asking if you’ve been crying is enough to make you repeat the whole process. Sometimes you feel better after a good cry; sometimes it just makes your eyes more tired. You leave as alone as you came. But not always.
I remember crying in the bathroom once in fifth grade (see, I told you I had experience with this). When I was looking in the mirror, this girl came in. She hugged me and told me to stop crying and that everything would be okay. Now, I had never seen this girl in my life. She was probably a grade younger than me and basically a complete stranger, yet when she said that, I suddenly felt okay. Over six years later, I don’t remember why I was even crying in the first place. But I remember her face.
Sometimes life is tough for reasons nobody else will understand. And you can’t really expect them to; we’re all different and going through our own problems. We all have different ways to cope, and in my humble opinion, I believe having a bit of a cry in the bathroom is better than doing drugs. To directly contradict myself in the second paragraph of this article, crying doesn’t make you weak. It means you have emotions (OMG???!!!!), and you have ways to show them. As someone who has spent ages beating herself up for being so sensitive and a crybaby, I’ve realized that I would rather feel too much than feel too little. In a world where life is finite (though some days may seem to drag on forever), I would rather cry in a bathroom and scream at the sky and punch the crap out of my pillow than walk around emotionlessly every day like nothing but a bag of skin and blood and whatever else is inside. I guess the lesson here is cry when you feel like it. Feel when you feel like it. And be a little nicer when you feel like it. It could mean a lot more to them than to you.