Creating a world where women can feel angry and men can cry

A vital factor in my personal growth was understanding that there is nothing wrong with communicating and feeling negative emotions such as sadness and anger. It always felt like I was being held in chains when someone told me I was not allowed to feel an emotion. I wondered to myself how people are good at not showing their emotions. As a woman, I was told that “You should not feel angry. Why would you yell at someone like that?”. Whereas on the part of a man, they are told to not cry and feel sad. It is not seen as masculine; they are discouraged from crying to the extent that I know men who do not like to even utter the word cry. A lot of men have told me “Stop crying, I hate people who cry and promise me you won’t feel sad and cry. These utterances are a desperate cry for help. People advise young boys “Big boys do not cry” and “Be a man.”

We must understand that when someone is prevented from communicating their feelings such as sadness and anger, there is no healthy way to vent out the feelings. As children, we are discouraged from showing negative emotions. Following this, we can conclude, that the girl will stop herself from communicating anger and eventually will find herself unable to listen to her feelings of anger when it is needed. The boy will find himself unable to tolerate his feelings of distress where crying would be most essential.

As a woman, I have had trouble expressing anger, which led to devastating consequences for my well-being. An illustration of the consequence would be my pounding headache and the stress that usually builds from within.  I remember that at certain times I shut my room door, curled into a ball on the floor, and cried for hours because I did not know how to voice my anger. A major concern here is, I have always been looked down on for publicly expressing my anger from the point of view of society.

I was in a rocky friendship where she occasionally said sentences that I perceived as insulting. I found myself upset following these incidents where I started to cry and go through a lot of emotional distress, but I didn’t once realize that I was angry with the way I was being treated. I remember one particular time when I felt humiliated. My friends and I met for dinner, I got up from my chair and stormed out, not being able to handle the unfamiliar emotion, which was anger/rage. Furthermore, I cried for hours in my room and when she would enquire about what was wrong, I did not know that I was feeling furious and was raging inside. I would attribute my distress to other events because I was desperate to figure out the reason for my sudden dip in mood.

I thought a lot about this unfamiliar emotion, and it dawned on me two years later after falling out with this friend. Not only that, but I, started to see a pattern in my behavior. Likewise, I could see a domino effect where one led to another. It struck me that I cried and felt miserable whenever I was in a situation that called for anger. It made me sad that I did not know the emotion I was feeling. Emotional understanding, felt like a basic thing to know about, tracing back to my upbringing as a girl child where anger was looked down upon. What bothered me was that I suppressed it to the point that a fundamental emotion was foreign to me. I made it a point to let myself feel emotions and communicate them irrespective of society’s opinion on it. The place I used to be in is scarier than being shamed for feeling anger.

Men do not have it easy as well, I have had a brief experience of being unable to cry, and that made me think of how hard it must be to be a man. Crying is a strength, and it is a natural tool provided to help us feel relaxed and to ease our emotional distress. When we do not express what we feel, we forget what it is like to feel that emotion the way it was meant to.

Ever since I was a little girl, I did not know what it was like to be unable to cry. I always saw it as a strength. I never understood why many people detested that particular action. Two years ago, I got the answer to why some people found it difficult to cry. For about a week before my birthday; I did not let myself cry. For some reason, I started to believe it was a weakness. I suppressed tears for one week, and then one day I felt the need to cry. What happened shocked me because my head ached, and my eyes were desperate to shed one drop but were unable to. The pounding headache and pressure in my head were too much, and I did not know what to do. Eventually, my eyes could shed tears. This experience led me to think about all men. I wonder if they have had such scary experiences? It sounds terrifying to me, and I hope the proportion of men who have to go through this have reduced.

The more I had life-changing experiences, the mental health condition of the world scared me. This discouragement of crying and anger starts as simple advice, but it has led all of us to believe that an appointment with a therapist meant weakness. I have been called emotional, but that is who I am. I am not afraid of my emotions because the ability to communicate emotions is the beauty of being a human. The younger version of myself was in a scary place because my own emotions felt foreign to me.

I have started to communicate what I feel because of special people who kept telling me one sentence which was “You are allowed to feel what you feel.”

After practicing this, I have become more proficient at showing emotions. I started to understand the names of different emotions and their intensities. I have stopped judging myself for feeling anger or sadness, and that has made my life so much easier. Upon realizing, that emotions are a natural gift to enrich our lives; I will use them the way they were meant to. If as a race we understand this it could create a huge impact.