I cried a lot growing up. Not in a colicky baby sort of way. In a way that I never intended. I never wanted my tears to spill out of me the way they did, but they were constantly giving me away. It was hard to convince people that everything was normal when my face was wet. 

Even now, when I step out of my apartment to get dish detergent, I might feel my eyes well up and my stomach drop. I might get a dormant impulse to cry on the kitchen floor or to run down the street. It has never made sense to me.

I hated most of the sports I played. Except soccer. In soccer, there was enough drama to keep me interested. I would play goalie, do almost nothing the entire game, block one shot, and then become the hero of the team. I also loved that the goalie got to wear a special costume that the other positions didn’t (big sticky gloves and a mouthguard). Soccer was dramatic, and kids cried all the time. If you lost, you could cry. If you fell down in the mud and “sprained an ankle” you could cry. It was the perfect environment for me as someone who cried a lot. Still, I hated doing drills at practice. And the mosquitos alone were enough to make me quit. 

I remember one time before a soccer game, I had (what I would now call) a panic attack in my dad’s pick-up truck. It was an away game, and I would always take a puff of my little red inhaler exactly 30 minutes before the first whistle blow. My exercise-induced asthma gave me character. I gripped the seat because I had forgotten my inhaler. Or, maybe I had taken three puffs instead of two. Or, maybe I hadn’t eaten. Regardless, my heart began to race, and I began to hyperventilate. I played that day regardless, but I wasn’t happy about it. I always focused on how everyone was going to know I was crying as I looked at my red, puffy eyes in the car mirror. 

At one of my basketball games, I fell flat on my back while trying to do the backwards-running-thing. I ran out of the gym, and I refused to go back in and finish the game. 

I would cry after every haircut I got until I was probably 15. Crying in my room wasn’t of interest to me. I wanted to be seen crying, and the kitchen floor was just the venue for me. Under a blanket, I would cry and scream and moan. “It isn’t about the haircut,” I would often tell my mom, through sobs. She never really understood what I meant by that.

One time on the way to a friend’s birthday party, I cried so much that I threw up into a bucket of unpopped Blockbuster popcorn because I knew I wouldn’t know any of the kids there. 

Whenever I was sad, I would leave my bedroom door open and sullenly play Solitaire on the floor until someone asked what was wrong. 

I cried when my sister played her Nancy Drew computer game because the music was too scary. 

I would cry as I chased my parents’ car down the street whenever they would leave me with a babysitter. Even if the babysitter was my grandma. 

Recently, I said to my mom, “I feel like I was such a quiet kid. Like I didn’t share a lot of what was going on.” She laughed. In some ways, though, I didn’t share what was going on. Sure, I was willing to display my emotions, but I could never articulate why they were happening. They were happening to me. It’s easy for me to feel like the only times I wasn’t crying were the times I was singing into a pasta ladle for my family at dinner or pretending to be Lizzie McGuire in my room with a towel over my head. 

Eventually, puberty hit. I grew to be over 6 feet tall. My baby fat disappeared. My dramatic mood swings and anxieties faded into quiet cries and texts to friends. People remarked on how much of a man I was becoming, and crying on the kitchen floor was no longer an option. Pretending to be Lizzie McGuire definitely wasn’t. 

But even now, when I’m stepping out of my apartment to get dish detergent, I might get a dormant impulse to cry on the kitchen floor or run down the street. The only difference is, I’m starting to understand why.