One time when I was a kid, my little sister, my mom, and I were cuddled up in her king-size bed under her really big red blanket, watching some Japanese movie. I barely remember the plot, let alone the name. My mom was wearing her very worn green cardigan that I always envied (I always wish I had stolen it when I got kicked out).
The movie got to a scene where a frog—or some frog-like creature—was burned by a fire and, I believe, died. It was more tragic than just him dying, but I truly can’t remember why it was so sad.
I remember vividly that my eyes started to fill with tears while my mom and sister kept watching. In that moment, I didn’t want them to see me cry, so I thought if I stayed completely still, they wouldn’t notice. My sister said something, confused as to why I was crying, since I had been deemed heartless since birth. My mom pulled me in and said, “Aww, Yuka really is just a big baby on the inside.” In that moment, my mind swore she was wrong.
As I got older, I grew less and less fond of crying, mainly because every time I cried, I was told to stop. I wasn’t really allowed to cry after the age of 10—I was basically fully grown in my parents’ eyes by then. But let me tell you, my brother and I almost never cried, and my little sister made up for it. She cried every day for all of us. She never let the “you’re not allowed to cry” rule apply to her, and now that I’m older, I wish I hadn’t either.
When I was sixteen, I started a tally of how many times I would cry each year, just to make sure I wasn’t truly heartless. I cried, on average, about once a year for the past decade—only truly shedding tears when I was extremely overwhelmed and had ignored my feelings to the point where I would break down for probably two hours… just to wipe the tears away, shove the feelings even further down, and wait another year to pass.
In the last two years, I’ve cried more than I can tally. Something about moving to Maine and doing my master’s has completely altered my ability to cry. The first year here, I cried almost once a month. Now, I tear up at anything remotely sad. Like tonight—I was watching a Japanese war movie called Grave of the Fireflies, and I cried within the first five minutes. I didn’t even make it through the whole movie because I couldn’t handle how sad it was making me.
I couldn’t help but want my mom to pull me in like she did when I was a kid, before I lost the innocence of crying. Maybe I didn’t finish the movie, but in a way, it was a full-circle moment—me healing a part of myself that I lost when I had to grow up too quickly.
Not only that, but in the past two years, I’ve felt more pain, happiness, sadness—a full rainbow of emotions—compared to what I was able to feel in the last decade. There are still times I wish I felt nothing… well, actually, it’s just pain I don’t want to feel in any form. But when you decide to feel nothing, the good also feels like nothing.
I’ve felt more love within myself and within life in general since I started actually feeling things again. And while that may mean I bawl my eyes out more often, feeling more deeply has allowed me to experience more happiness and love than I ever thought I was capable of.
Maybe I truly am a big baby after all.