So many tears but what do they say?

Summary

Proxy Podcast with Yowei Shaw: "So Many Tears But What Do They Say?"

Release Date: September 26, 2024

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Introduction: Navigating the Emotional Aftermath of Layoffs

In this poignant episode of Proxy, host Yowei Shaw delves deep into the intricate emotions surrounding her personal experience with being laid off from NPR. Serving as a prologue to the upcoming first season, Shaw reflects on her three-part series about the mental health toll of layoffs, emphasizing the profound role that tears played in her journey toward healing.

Yowei Shaw [00:00]: "For the record, I'm not crying anymore about the layoff. I'm in a good place, but when I look back, crying was a big part of my layoff experience."

Shaw shares relatable moments of suppressing tears in various social settings—birthday parties, conferences, and even NPR headquarters—highlighting the universal struggle of concealing vulnerability in public.

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Exploring Tears with Heather Crystal

To unravel the complexities of crying, Shaw invites Heather Crystal, a poet and professor at Emory University, to the conversation. Heather, the author of The Crying Book, provides both personal anecdotes and scholarly insights into the phenomenon of tears.

Heather Crystal [03:41]: "I'm equipped. I've got tissues here, and then I've got my glass of water here."

Heather and Shaw discover their shared experiences, including crying during job interviews despite securing the positions, and the common trigger of encountering unexpected kindness from those outside their immediate circles.

Heather Crystal [04:22]: "I know that's the moment where I just absolutely lose my shit."

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The Science and Communication of Tears

Heather Crystal elucidates the different types of tears—basal, irritant, and emotional—explaining their unique compositions and purposes.

Heather Crystal [05:58]: "Emotional tears are thicker than those irritant tears. They have a higher protein content, and so that makes them thicker."

Emotional tears serve as a powerful communicative tool, signaling a request for help and eliciting empathy from others. Shaw connects this to evolutionary psychology, suggesting that crying in adults mirrors the helplessness seen in infants, thereby maintaining its role as a call for support.

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Challenges in Receiving Support

The conversation shifts to the societal and interpersonal challenges in responding to someone’s tears. An international study on crying reveals that the ideal audience for crying is typically a single other person, allowing for meaningful attention and support. In contrast, crying in groups can lead to confusion and inadequate responses.

Heather Crystal [08:00]: "There's an ideal number, one other person present. That's the mathematics of satisfactory crying experience."

Shaw shares a personal anecdote about giving a PowerPoint presentation while crying, illustrating how group settings can hinder effective support and leave both the crier and the audience feeling uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond.

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Heartwarming Acts of Support

Heather recounts two significant instances where compassionate individuals responded appropriately to her tears:

1. Support During Grief: After receiving a distressing phone call about her friend's suicide, Heather felt overwhelmed yet managed to continue her responsibilities. A friend noticed her distress and provided a quiet space for her to process her emotions.

   Heather Crystal [09:42]: "She just passed it up to me and then went and sat back down. And it was so kind."

2. Onstage Support: During a poetry reading, overwhelmed by a fellow poet's harrowing recitation, Heather was visibly distressed on stage. Jericho Brown, a poet and Heather's colleague, discreetly handed her a tissue, allowing her a moment to compose herself without drawing further attention.

   Heather Crystal [11:49]: "Jericho Brown... grabbed a tissue from his bag and he just passed it up to me."

These stories underscore the importance of empathy and unobtrusive support in moments of vulnerability.

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Strategies for Managing Tears

As Shaw and Heather discuss practical approaches to controlling or managing tears, several techniques emerge:

1. Distraction Methods:

   • Color Focus: Choosing a specific color and identifying all instances of it in the environment.
   • Grounding Techniques: Pressing feet firmly into the ground or clenching and unclenching fists.

2. Physiological Interventions:

   • Deep Breathing: Engaging in slow, controlled breaths to calm the nervous system.
   • Drinking Water: Interrupting the emotional process by hydrating.

3. Behavioral Adjustments:

   • Facial Muscle Control: Squeezing facial muscles or avoiding blinking to prevent tear formation.
   • Physical Gestures: Fidgeting or holding an object (e.g., Shaw rubbing a jade piece).

4. Cognitive Techniques:

   • Mantras: Repeating a calming phrase to maintain composure.
   • Happy Place Visualization: Imagining a serene and joyful environment to shift focus.

Heather Crystal [14:27]: "Drinking water is actually a really good one. Because you're using some of the same physical elements of your body, it can kind of be an interruption of the process."

Additionally, Heather humorously suggests unconventional methods, such as the Joan Didion-inspired technique of placing a paper bag over one's head to disrupt the emotional surge.

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Interactive Live Experiment: Testing Cry Control Techniques

Towards the episode's conclusion, Shaw narrates an adaptation of a live show conducted at their Patreon office in New York City. The segment featured an interactive experiment where volunteers attempted to produce tears using scientifically proven methods.

1. Volunteer Participation:

   • Emily Irvin: An emotional participant already inclined to cry.
   • Stoic Tom: A stoic individual with difficulty crying.

2. Experiment Execution:
   The volunteers watched a Thai life insurance commercial, renowned for its tear-evoking content, aiming to elicit emotional responses.

   Yowei Shaw [19:25]: "In the video, you see a man walking down the street... The days go by. The man keeps helping out the same characters. And then one day, he spots the mom asking for money on the sidewalk. But there's no daughter next to her. He's worried."

3. Outcome:

   • Emily began to show signs of crying, partially responding to the emotional stimulus.
   • Stoic Tom struggled to produce tears, even attempting the paper bag method without success.

   The experiment highlighted individual differences in emotional responsiveness and the effectiveness of various techniques.

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Conclusion: Embracing Emotional Signals

In wrapping up the episode, Shaw and Heather emphasize the significance of recognizing and appropriately responding to tears—both our own and others'. They advocate for carrying empathy and understanding in daily interactions, ensuring that emotional signals like tears are met with genuine care rather than awkward uncertainty.

Heather Crystal [13:02]: "Sometimes you don't want to answer the question because you know that the question is going to make you cry even more. So I think it's actually a really good thing to carry around tissues with you."

Yowei Shaw [13:33]: "Sometimes that's all you need, knowing that your problem has been seen and that somebody cares."

Additional Resources and Credits

• Heather Crystal's New Book: In the A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Available for pre-order)
• Follow Heather: Instagram and Twitter @eatherchristal
• Production Credits: Edited by John Delor, produced by Yowei Shaw and Kim Nadervane Petersa, mixed by Kyle Pulley, with theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder.
• Support Proxy: Join their Patreon for ad-free episodes and exclusive content.

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Thank you for tuning into Proxy with Yowei Shaw. For more emotional investigative journalism™️, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and join the conversation on Instagram @proxypodcast.

Transcript

[Yowei Shaw]

Psst. I don't think I've ever made that noise before, but I am thrilled to tell you that Normal Gossip is back for its eighth season. Join the delightful Rachel Hampton each episode as she shares the juiciest gossip from the real world with a special guest. I had the extreme honor of guesting recently and the production team told me I had a very expressive gossip face, which I couldn't help. There were so many twists and turns. Normal Gossip was named one of the best podcasts of 2024 by Tom Time Magazine and Vulture. You can listen now to the new season wherever you get your podcasts and catch Normal Gossip live this September when they go on tour. For more information, check out normalgossiplive.com hey everybody, a quick heads up before the show. Today's episode briefly mentions suicide, so take care while listening. And if you're feeling depressed or want to talk to someone, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention lifeline by dialing 988. Okay, on to the show. Welcome to Proxy, a show that investigates emotions. I'm Yowei Shaw. So back in spring, I made a three part series about the emotional and mental health toll of layoffs that is kind of the prologue to this show. In the series, I looked at my own layoff from npr. Why it was so traumatic, why layoffs are so personal. If you haven't listened, you can go back to episode one of this podcast titled Layoff Girl. But there was one part of my layoff that didn't make the series that I keep coming back to. The tears. For the record, I'm not crying anymore about the layoff. I'm in a good place, but when I look back, crying was a big part of my layoff experience. It's why I decided to dress up as a Kleenex box in a music video that nobody asked for. It's something I thought a lot about, specifically that moment when you feel like you're about to cry in front of other people but are trying as hard as you can not to cry. There were so many moments like this in the year post layoff at birthday parties, conferences. Once at NPR headquarters when I thought it'd be a good idea to attend an Asian American Journalist association event to support friends just a few months after getting laid off. Why, oh why did I do that to myself? And look, I'm not anti tears. I love a quarterly cry in the bathtub. I cry all the time with friends and family. I'm a crier. It's not a big deal. But we've all had these moments. You get dumped but still have to play truth or dare at the bachelorette party. You lose a loved one, but have to get on a work call a week later. These moments when you can feel the backs of your eyeballs burning, your face getting hot, a pressure climbing up your throat when you need to cry, but you don't want to cry. Well, today we're publishing one of our monthly episodes until season one comes out next year. And I want to slow down and think about what's happening in that moment. What are tears for? What do they communicate? And what should we do when we see them? To help me navigate this winding river of tears is this person.

[Heather Crystal]

I'm equipped. I've got tissues here, and then I've got my glass of water here.

[Emily Irvin]

Hell, yeah, the tissues.

[Yowei Shaw]

Heather Crystal is a poet and professor at Emory University. When I went down the rabbit hole of tears, I found a book she wrote. It's called the Crying Book. Like me, Heather cries a lot. In fact, we learned that we've both cried in a job interview and still got the job. Also, we have the same cry trigger. People being nice. Specifically people who aren't in your immediate circle of closeness, who aren't required to be nice to you, but still are, especially when you're in a vulnerable state.

[Heather Crystal]

I know that's the moment where I just absolutely lose my shit.

[Yowei Shaw]

I wonder why that is.

[Heather Crystal]

I think that it can sometimes feel like there's been a long stretch where perhaps you've been struggling and have not always known how to be kind to yourself in it.

[Yowei Shaw]

When Heather wrote the book, she was going through an unusually wet period. She'd just become a mom and was deep in that phase. I still don't know how people deal with where you just aren't getting sleep. And she was grieving the death of her close friend, the poet Bill Cassidy. So she was crying a lot. She would find an apple she'd taken a bite of and lost track of. The apple was now brown. Tears. Or she'd be at the airport and a terrible, tanned businessman would be talking too loud on the phone. And later on the plane, the same terrible, tanned businessman would drop a water bottle on her head. Tears.

[Heather Crystal]

This guy, like, why this guy? He's always on the plane.

[Yowei Shaw]

When I read Heather's book, I was like, she gets it. She gets me. She had all these questions about tears that I had post layoff. And she looks for answers in lots of places. Science, literature, sociology, cultural history, people's stories. She also zeroes in on the Communication of tears, which I loved because that was my curiosity, too. What are they saying? Well, it turns out that depends on the kind of tears we're crying, because we have three.

[Heather Crystal]

One are basal tears, which are the ones that are always present in your eye. They're kind of oily, they lubricate so that you're not having itchy, uncomfortable eyes all the time. And then there are irritant tears, which happen if you get a speck of dust in your eye or if you're chopping onions. And I didn't know before that there was a difference between those tears and the tears that we cry for emotional reasons. But there are so irritant tears are a lot more watery, a lot thinner, because they're just all about, like, getting that thing out. But emotional tears are thicker than those irritant tears. They have a higher protein content, and so that makes them thicker. Functionally, the practical effect of that is that they fall more slowly down your face. And so if you are trying to communicate something, or if some part of you is trying to communicate something even when you don't want it to be, having it slowly appear on your face and stick around for a while and is useful. Tears are a communicative signal, a request for help. It lets people know.

[Yowei Shaw]

One theory is that emotional tears evolve from babies. Babies are famously helpless and can't talk. So crying is their primary signal to adults that they need food, they need to be changed, they need attention. And we kept crying as adults because as we all know, we can still be helpless babies who need support sometimes or a lot of the time. So crying is a cry for help. Seems straightforward enough. So why do people fail to respond to our tears in the way we want so often? Researchers have looked into this, and part of the answer depends on how many people you're crying in front of. According to an international study on crying.

[Heather Crystal]

There'S an ideal number, one other person present. That's the mathematics of satisfactory crying experience. And lets there be enough, I think, focus that it is possible for things to be tended to in a meaningful way, whereas if you're in a group, there's more of a chance for other dynamics to get activated.

[Yowei Shaw]

Other dynamics like cultural norms around crying and all the confusion and complexity that comes with adding people to the mix. Let me give an example. I have a friend who once gave an entire PowerPoint presentation for a half hour while crying the whole time. The waterwork started at slide two, when there were 20 slides to go. Okay, the friend is me. But, yeah, I could tell the people in the room were uncomfortable and didn't know what to do. I talked to them later about it, and some interesting things came up. One person said they felt pressured to pay extra hard attention and be a good audience member. Someone else said, selfishly, they didn't want me to stop because they thought the content was interesting. But mostly they weren't sure how to comfort me, whether I wanted to be rescued or not. They kept looking to others in the room for cues, and. And so the presentation just kept going and going, and we all suffered through it. Heather told me about a time when she was about to suffer through tears in public. But then someone intervened. She was at a writers conference. She'd volunteered to man the table for a literary magazine. Talked to conference goers about submitting poems. And then she got a call that her friend Bill had died for some reason.

[Heather Crystal]

Even though I had just received this phone call from my friend Jules telling me that our friend Bill had died by suicide. And I had, you know, sunk to the bathroom floor in my hotel room, I still got up and walked to go take this shift. I was running on automatic, but my body was producing tears. So when I arrived, a friend saw me and looked at me and said no, and turned me around and took me to a table in a corner where I could. Where I could cry and come to understand some of my initial feelings in the wake of that news. Ask questions of her that I never would have asked otherwise because she had responded to that signal.

[Yowei Shaw]

Thank fucking God for friends. But there isn't always a friend around to intervene. Let's hear one more story from Heather.

[Heather Crystal]

I was at a poetry reading at a writers conference. And they do these panel readings where, you know, four different poets will be reading. And you're all up on, like, a stage, sitting at a table, and there's a lectern in the middle. And when it's your turn to read, you get up and you read from the lectern. This was in the era of sleeplessness. We had brought our kid with us. They were like 14 months old or something. They had an ear infection. It was a nightmare. And this poet got up and read a poem in which this just, like, horrific violence occurs against a pregnant woman. And I was covered in tears. There was no way that I was going to be able to intervene and interrupt them on my own. And I also was up on a stage. It's not like I could, like, rummage through my bag. I didn't have any tissues with me, you know.

[Yowei Shaw]

Remember, Heather said, this is the Worst configuration for crying. And not only is Heather crying in front of a room of people, she's also trapped on stage. But then someone in the audience sees Heather's tears and responds to the signal.

[Heather Crystal]

The poet Jericho Brown, who is now my colleague and who I adore with all my heart, was sitting in the front row. And this is gonna make me cry just talking about it. But he saw, and just in this incredibly unobtrusive way, he grabbed a tissue from his bag and he just passed it up to me and then went and sat back down. And that was it. And it was so kind. It was so kind. And it let me tend to the thing that I needed to tend to, which is just to have something I could wipe my tears on. Because you don't want to be wiping your tears on your sleeve when you're up on a stage.

[Yowei Shaw]

So how can we be more like Jericho Brown? How can we respond in the way someone needs, Especially when it's someone you're not close to? Like, do you ask the person crying why they're crying?

[Heather Crystal]

Sometimes you don't want to answer the question because you know that the question is going to make you cry even more. So I think it's actually a really good thing to carry around tissues with you, because sometimes that's all the person needs. Then they don't have to talk. They don't have to explain their problem to you. Then you're not trying to be like, let me solve your problem for you, buddy. They just know that their problem has been seen, that somebody cares.

[Yowei Shaw]

Sometimes that's all you need, knowing that your problem has been seen and that somebody cares. And sometimes you'd really just rather not cry in the first place. Like, in my layoff meeting, I swore I wouldn't cry. I swore I wouldn't even came up with a drinking game to prevent the tears. I told myself I'd take a shot later for every time I broke, because, blech, I hate shots. And I cried seven times. I told Heather the story, and she said in her research, she's actually collected several techniques for how not to cry. Her favorite method is one she found while reading Joan Didion one day.

[Heather Crystal]

It's been explained to her that if you want to stop crying, it's really good to put a paper bag over your head, like a sort of, like, grocery bag. And it does actually have some kind of physiological benefit that she doesn't fully understand or explain, but she says it has the added benefit of just making you feel a little ridiculous. And it's Hard to think of yourself as Kathy from Wuthering Heights with your head in a grocery store bag, which.

[Yowei Shaw]

Is true if putting a paper bag over your head isn't possible, because that might raise even more alarm. Here's another technique to try.

[Heather Crystal]

Drinking water is actually a really good one. Because you're using some of the same physical elements of your body, it can kind of be an interruption of the process. It works best, I find, if you do it earlier on. Like if you're in a full on sob, water may not do the trick. So, you know, time it appropriately.

[Yowei Shaw]

Other techniques from Heather and the Internet. Pick a color and find every occurrence of it in the room. To distract and steady yourself. Deep breathing. Think of your happy place. Physically ground yourself. Clench, unclench your fist. Press your feet firmly into the ground. Say a mantra. You can also try muscling your way through it. Tilt your chin up. Open your eyes wide. Avoid blinking. Squeeze your facial muscles, or fidget with your hands. In my case, you can find me rubbing a piece of jade I found in a Taiwanese market that miraculously looks like a pair of butt cheeks. Finally, let's say you're not able to stop the tears. Let's say you've cried your eyes out and need to get on a zoom call to pitch your podcast to the eighth production company you've talked to this year. Not speaking from experience, apparently Preparation H helps. Just like how Preparation H can calm down the inflammation of hemorrhoids. So too can Preparation H be applied to puffy eyes.

[Heather Crystal]

Not your eyeballs, the skin around your eyes. I don't want to get anybody hurt. Also, apparently it's not good to do it for, like, long term. It can thin the skin a bit, so, you know, save it for the moments when you really need it.

[Yowei Shaw]

Okay, so this story is actually an adaptation of a live show we did at the Patreon office the other week in New York City. And what you're about to hear is how we ended the show.

[Emily Irvin]

Okay. We talked a lot about crying, blah, blah, blah. One last thing I want us to do together. It's a group activity where we are going to experiment to see if any of these methods actually work. I need two volunteers. Is there anybody who cries very easily, who is a crybaby like me? Anybody?

[Yowei Shaw]

Okay.

[Emily Irvin]

Would you be willing? Okay, great. Is there a stoic in the audience? Somebody who rarely cries? Yes. Okay. Would you please come up to the stage? Thank you. Thank you for being brave. What's your name?

[Tom McNeil]

I'm Emily.

[Emily Irvin]

Hello, Emily. What makes you usually cry?

[Tom McNeil]

I started crying during the podcast when you start talking about that other woman crying, and I felt like everything was sad. And so I've already. I'm already a little weepy, so I think we could get it going.

[Emily Irvin]

Okay, this is excellent. This is excellent.

[Yowei Shaw]

Okay, what's your name?

[Heather Crystal]

Stoic Tom.

[Emily Irvin]

Stoic Tom, When's the last time you cried, Stoic Tom?

[Yowei Shaw]

Probably about two years ago.

[Heather Crystal]

It was very heavy, but it was probably about two years ago.

[Emily Irvin]

Okay. I think I have found the perfect volunteers for this very scientific experiment. Okay. So when scientists study crying, they have to have a way to reliably make people cry. And so what you're about to watch is a video that researchers have used in an actual study to make people cry. It is a Thai life insurance commercial. Does anybody know about Thai life insurance commercials? Okay, so Thai life insurance commercials are this genre. These videos have been watched millions and millions and millions of times online. They've cracked the code, this insurance company, for how to make people cry. They want you to think about your loved ones, the value of life, and that presumably gets you to purchase life insurance. So what I want you to do, all of us, is we're going to watch the video and. And I would like you to edge up to the point of tears. That's not going to be a problem for you, Stoke Tom. But everybody else, allow yourself to edge right up. And then I would like you to choose one of the methods that we've discussed to see if it works. I also have props.

[Yowei Shaw]

One of the volunteers wants to try the Joan Didion bag method. So I hand her a paper bag to put over her head, and then we all turn to watch the TV in the room.

[Emily Irvin]

All right, let's go.

[Yowei Shaw]

In the video, you see a man walking down the street going about his day and helping everyone. He comes across an elderly woman huffing and puffing to push her food cart over a curb. He rushes over to help a stray dog who walks up while he's eating lunch. He hands over the chicken leg. A mom and daughter asking for money on the sidewalk. He empties out his wallet. The days go by. The man keeps helping out the same characters. And then one day, he spots the mom asking for money on the sidewalk. But there's no daughter next to her. He's worried. And then he hears someone crying. Mom. He turns around and sees that it's the little girl he's been giving money to this whole time. She's now in a school uniform.

[Emily Irvin]

All right, I see some redness here. So the paper bag method.

[Tom McNeil]

I think it worked. I think I have a little bit under here, but mostly put it on. I heard some laughs. I was like, okay, we're on. And then I kind of smiled and then I held my head back and kept him in.

[Emily Irvin]

I'm guessing there were no tears.

[Heather Crystal]

I used the Being Scottish method and I was protected from my emotions once again.

[Emily Irvin]

Very good, very good. And I do have an unopened box of Preparation H if anybody needs it. It's at the front if you would like to take if you're going somewhere after this. Thank you everybody so much. You've been a great audience. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

[Yowei Shaw]

Thank you to Heather Crystal for helping me think differently about my tears. Thank you and giving me a toolkit for what to do the next time someone cries in front of me. Heather has a new book coming out in March. It's called in the A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf. It's available for pre order in all the usual places and you can follow Heather's work on Instagram and Twitter eatherchristal. That's Heather C H R I S T L E. You can also find those links in our show notes along with the Thai life insurance commercial if you want to try the experiment yourself. This episode was edited by John Delor and produced by me, Yohei Shaw and Kim Nadervane Petersa. It was mixed by Kyle Pulley. Theo Cobb is our Social Media Manager and our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. I made a three minute version of the story a while ago for Audioflux, one of my favorite new spaces for experimental independent audio and short docs. It's the brainchild of Julie Shapiro and John Delore. You can check that story out and other AudioFlux [e-mail] and even submit your own. As always, our email is proxythepodmail.com youm can follow us on Instagram @Proxypodcast and you can follow me Yoe Shaw. Let me know if the episode made you cry. And you can sign up for our newsletter by going to patreon.com ProxyPodcast it's free, just sign up for the free membership tier. Speaking of Patreon, thank you to Patreon for inviting us to be part of Fast Company's Innovation Festival and letting us drink all your seltzer from your seltzer fridge. Thank you to Adiya Taylor, Jacob Masvidal, Sofia Yiannopoulos, Stephanie Smelley, and Tom Waring. And thank you to our brave volunteers, Emily Irvin and Tom McNeil Proxy is a completely independent production. If you want to support season one, go to patreon.com proxipodcast to become a member. You'll get main feed episodes without ads as well as exclusive monthly bonus episodes. Thank you thank you to everyone who's already signed up. It really, really helps. For this month's bonus episode, you'll hear an extended interview I did with Heather. We talk about the power dynamics of tears, the time I cried in my job interview for Invisibilia, and what that lump in your throat when you're about.

[Heather Crystal]

To cry really is what we call a lump. Sleep is a passage that your body has opened for you.

[Yowei Shaw]

See you next month.

[Unknown]

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[Heather Crystal]

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