You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

-Mary Oliver

Thursday 25 October 2007

The Girl who Cries

I seem to have a knack for cementing my position as "the girl who cries." Last year I managed to turn on the waterworks (however unintentionally) several times in each of my classes, and now that we have a new voice teacher, of course I had to spend the majority of our first class with him in tears. Don't get me wrong - he's an amazing teacher, and it was a great class. But when you go into a class as intimate as voice already feeling a bit shaken and vulnerable, tears are sure to follow.

I felt shaken and vulnerable because a classmate, ostensibly in jest, called me a bitch right before class started.

He was joking, of course. But the context in which it was said made me terrified that I could come across that way. Especially since Uganda, and also by virtue(?) of being a space caretaker for the school, I tend to let the organisational side of me go a bit into overdrive, and I think it's possible that I come across a tad authoritarian sometimes. Instead of suggesting, I sometimes have the tendency to state. I often take more responsibility than is necessary onto my shoulders and stop trusting or expecting others to help, but then if the responsibility stresses me out, it comes back to the people around me. I think sometimes I get so stuck in my own head with figuring things out that, once I think I have, I spell them out for everyone else and completely unintentionally end up treating other people like they're stupid. Which is the last thing I mean to do, but that doesn't mean it couldn't come across that way. And sometimes I forget to listen.

I'm a good person. I know I am, and I know that I try to be. But that doesn't mean I couldn't be better.

3 comments:

Gemma said...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-10-24-crying-men_N.htm?csp=34

Janna said...

or maybe you are a great person, and people shouldn't be calling you a bitch, especially when they mean to say something far more productive such as, "you are coming across to me as unflexible".

it is ok to be mad at someone for being an asshat.

Gemma said...

OK, my link doesn't work. But there was an article about a study that says that women are taken less seriously when they cry because it's seen as weak, but if they don't cry or show emotion they are seen as hardened and mean. Men, however, are very likeable when they cry. (Think Bill Clinton.)

So: cry or don't cry. People will hate you either way!

Also: I second Janna.

(Hi, Janna!)