Hi! I’m Jonathan, and I write about developing emotional intelligence along life’s journey. Sometimes I reflect on all the time I’ve spent playing ultimate, too. If you like what I’m doing, please consider sharing with a friend or subscribing.
I also teach writing classes, and I’ve got a few starting this week and next. Here’s one, and here’s another.
There’s a lot of gunk that builds up along the way. What follows is about letting it out.
Part I
There’s a picture of me from College Nationals in 2009, after our last game, the last of my career, which was a bracket loss to Texas. It’s zoomed in on my face, and I am completely broken. Ugly crying, as they say. Sobbing, and nothing else.
I was embarrassed by this photo for a long time. I asked my friend Steve, the photographer, to remove it from his public album because I didn’t want that part of me on full display. But I’ve been thinking about it recently.
Another time, after a different Nationals ended, I sat in a hotel conference room with my club teammates, each of us sharing what the season and team had meant to us. There were more tears, many of which were mine.
I have a few other memories like these, where frisbee made me cry. I can’t say the same for other, vast swaths of my life– I don’t remember shedding tears over my parents’ divorce, or big breakups, or family hospital stays, for example.
I’ve been scornful of this fact for a while. Weeping over a game? It seems so backward.
There’s a different way to see it, though: thank God for frisbee. Thank God for anywhere where it’s ok to cry.
Instead of raging about how this shouldn’t have been the only place, I now say thank you for being there at all. If you weren’t, there might have been nowhere.
It’s not easy to cry. It’s not easy to know that I need to cry. But the game knew.
Part II
By the time my dad died, I had been crying for months. A year earlier, some kind of glacier had broken free, and the tears came in floods of memories and feelings I found as my dreams and journal pages retraced steps through life’s darkest forests.
As September moved into October into November, I would sit on the couch, crying in Katharine’s arms.
One morning, while getting ready for work, I turned on an old song with the intention of eating breakfast and turning on my monitors. I sat down on the couch and wept for two hours. After that, I found the practice of going into our room and shutting the door and putting on my headphones and starting up the playlist. Lyrics and chord progressions and solos and the ways singers held and bent notes made it easy to cry.
I’d weep and weep. Tears that felt ancient. Tears of my childhood, put on hold, stored up and held in my body. Tears of big hurts and little hurts, millions of hurts with common denominators: unseen, unacknowledged, unknown.
There was a heat coming out from deep inside, from my stomach and the veins that ran out to my finger tips and toes. It lived stored in my back— at one point, after wringing myself out like a sponge, I got a spine pop that felt 1000 years in the making.
Generational pain. Tears my grandfathers and their grandfathers never cried. Tears I hadn’t cried. My wounds hadn’t healed right, and they needed to be ripped open and cleaned out. Crying was part of how.
Part III
It had been months since I had really cried. I wondered how healthy that was. Was I missing out on something?
That hot, rushing release toward weightlessness. The breaking of the dam. Not holding back anymore. Letting go is, in my experience, both paramount and very hard to do. Crying is, in my experience, one of the surest paths there.
I’ve heard more than one person say something that goes like this: I didn’t want to cry because I was afraid that if I started, I’d never stop.
At this point, that isn’t scary to me. I’m not sure if it’s because I believe the stopping does indeed arrive, or because I’ve found that there in that physical bliss of starting, there’s no real need to stop.
On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly where I was standing— at least some part of me. Months, I said. There I was, singing the praises of a good cry, but a few full moons had come and gone since my last.
These days were nothing like that fall.
Why is that?
As I consider daily practice, spiritual hygiene, chopping wood and carrying water, I think to myself: when was the last time I cried? What was there to mourn then, and what is there to mourn now? Where are my headphones?
You’ve got a story. Tell it.
I teach writing classes, and those who attend write about everything from long-lost step-siblings to weird exchanges on Facebook Marketplace. I’ve got a few open spots in groups that meet on the following times:
2-4pm EST on Fridays, 9/9, 9/16, 9/23, 10/7, 10/14, 10/21 (Sign up here)
7-9pm EST on Mondays, 9/12, 9/19, 9/26, 10/3, 10/17, 10/24 (Sign up here)
One class is even frisbee-themed:
4-5:30pm EST on Mondays; 9/19, 9/26, 10/10, 10/17 (Sign up here)
Here’s what one former student said about joining:
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Bits and pieces
This interview with a renowned expert is about anger in the wake of school shootings—Uvalde in particular—and the line between that feeling being generative vs. corrosive. It’s short, and the whole thing is good, but here’s one line that strikes me:
We can honor and thank our anger— for a time. But just as we must work to soften our numbness and denial in grief, we must also work to soften our anger, so that we can fully encounter the necessary pain it has done such a good job of guarding against."
Finally, I waffled on whether including the actual photo would make what I wrote more or less complete. For what it’s worth:
Enjoy your week, or weekend, or whatever stretch of days is on the horizon when you read this.
- Jonathan
The crying game
I appreciate that you're writing about this, Jonathan, and I hope you continue. Looking forward to Parts IV, V and VI.
❤️