The Loneliest Liberal:Tears and more tears

By James Knudsen

Ask about me of those who knew me as a child and I imagine you will get a variety of responses. Ask me and I will tell you that I was a crier, a cry baby, an easily bruised tomato, a flower that wilted under extremely mild heat. I cried over just about anything. Some of the tears came from the usual childhood traumas – bee stings, crashing a bicycle, crashing a skateboard – and these may be viewed as reasonable, normal, perhaps even healthy responses.
    And then there were the tears born of what must have been a hyper-emotional psyche. I’ll leave it to those with more than my lone semester of high school Psychology 1 to provide a precise diagnosis. Regardless of the path to my particular -ology, I was primed to turn on the water works. Movies, you bet – Born Free, Brian’s Song, Wizard of Oz – all were worthy of my tears.
    Awkward moment at the county fair in eighth grade, cue the tears. Older brother looking my way – “Commence crying in, 3, 2,... and we have lacrimation!”
    Growing up in an enlightened, forward thinking household did nothing to diminish my inclination toward leaky eyelids, as I can’t recall being admonished for my outbursts. Though they became less frequent, moments that warranted or demanded tears continued through high school.

It’s safe to say that four years in the Marine Corps provided a sort of inoculation against crying. Crying episodes weren’t non-existent, but over the course of my four-year enlistment, I can recall only one post-boot camp instance. That’s a significant decline. According to the world wide fountain of knowledge, adult men cry an average of six to seventeen times a year. And for a period of several years, six times a year would have been a very wet year for me.
    I can’t pinpoint the moment or if there was a conscious decision, but I stopped crying at some point in my twenties. There were no tears, but there were also no smiles. I have the headshots to prove it. Chalk it up to some misguided idea about being an adult, a grown-up, a man. Tally me one more young man with a profound lack of understanding about emotions and dynamics.

The older me now attempts to impart some of the understanding learned (emphasis on the earned) to students of theatre. Track down one of those students and they’ll likely tell you of a jagged line scrawled on the white-board in dry-erase marker, a sawtooth waveform resembling a first-grader’s attempt at drawing a mountain range. It is my hasty, visual depiction of life. It is the mountains and valleys the character Diana sings of in the song I Miss the Mountains, from the musical, Next to Normal. It is joy and sorrow, laughter and tears. It is a continuous line that connects my highest highs to my lowest lows and reminds me that, without the tears that I now shed at a rate well above the average of six to seventeen times a year, I cannot know the laughter that tumbles out of me with even greater frequency than the tears.

Copyright © 2018 by James Knudsen