the beautiful rebellion of feeling it all

"cry about it." you know what? i will! thanks for the suggestion.

You have heard the words before, haven’t you? It’s a phrase thrown like stones, sharp and careless, meant to convey that your sorrow is too heavy, your sadness is too loud, and your tenderness is inconvenient and must be dismissed.

"Cry about it," they say, as if crying is a stain you could scrub from your skin, as if feeling is a weakness you ought to outgrow, as if the deepest parts of you—the ones that ache and tremble and overflow—were something you needed to apologize for.

And maybe, for a while, you tried.

Maybe you taught yourself how to hold it all inside, how to turn your own heart into a locked room where no one could hear the walls cracking.
Maybe you learned how to fake a smile while you were grieving inside, how to carry the weight of your pain with a grace so quiet that no one would guess how heavy it had become.

But here is my truth, that I compel all of you to internalize: I will cry about it.
I will cry because it mattered.
I will cry because it changed me, carved its initials into the softest parts of who I am, and pretending otherwise would only deepen the wound.
I will cry because my body deserves the honesty of my own grief, deserves the chance to empty itself of the sorrows it was never meant to carry forever.

Crying is not a collapse.
It is not a defeat.
It is the purest act of survival—a soft, defiant refusal to let the hard edges of the world close you off from yourself.

It’s the rising flood when your heart can’t make room for one more unspoken sorrow.
It is the rain that falls when there is no language large enough to speak the magnitude of what you feel.
It is the soul’s way of keeping itself soft in a world that keeps asking it to be steel.

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Somewhere along the way, we were taught that vulnerability was a danger, that emotion was a crack in the armor, that silence was strength and stoicism was salvation.
But the truth is, strength was never about how tightly you could lock the door to your own heart.
Strength was always about how bravely you could let it open, how fiercely you could let yourself be touched, how unapologetically you could live in the full flood of your own humanity.

And when someone says "cry about it" with that curl of the lip, that flash of contempt, what they are really saying is, I have never learned how to honor my own pain, so I will mock yours instead.
And that is not your burden to carry.
That is not your cue to shrink.

You do not have to grow harder just to make yourself bearable to those who have forgotten how to feel.
You do not have to wear your sorrow like shame that you must conceal.
You do not have to apologize for being tender, for feeling, for being human.

Cry about it.
Cry for the dreams that never had a chance to bloom.
Cry for the goodbyes that came too soon, and the ones that dragged on long after love had already left the room.
Cry for the silent disappointments, for the almosts and the never-was, for the moments that seared themselves into your memory and the cruelty that carved deep scars into your bones.

Cry because you are still capable of being moved.
Cry because you still believe, in some secret, stubborn part of yourself, that even in a broken world, it is worth it to care this much.
Cry because every tear is a testament to the fact that you have not gone numb, that you have not given up, that you are still here — heart beating, spirit burning, unwilling to stop feeling just because it sometimes hurts too much.

---

Tears are not shameful.
They are sacred.
They are the cries your body releases when the silence is too heavy, the tides your soul turns when it is time to wash away the heaviness that does not belong to you.

Let them come without apology.
Let them soften the cracked and weathered corners of your spirit.
Let them carry you back to yourself, not harder, but truer.

You were never meant to be stone.
You were never meant to be cold and unfeeling and untouched by the weight of your own living.
You were made to be breakable and luminous, made to be split open and healed and split open again, made to be forever remade by every love, every loss, every hope you were brave enough to hold in your hands.

So yes, I will cry about it.
I will cry until the walls inside me crumble and the rivers inside me rise and the parts of me that I thought had been lost find their way home.
I will cry because feeling it all—all the pain, all the beauty, all the unbearable, miraculous ache of being human—is not something to be ashamed of.

It is a beautiful rebellion against the numbness that would rather have me silenced.
It is a declaration that my heart is still open, still willing, still alive.

And I would rather live wide open and hurting than safe and hollow.
I would rather feel it all than feel nothing at all.

I would rather cry—and survive—than ever forget what it means to be fully, gloriously, unapologetically human.

Because we are not here to be unbroken. We are here to be alive.