Forget #DryJanuary. Sobbing with strangers for #CryJanuary is so much more fun, it’s lasting through February.
By Linda Rodriguez McRobbieUpdated February 15, 2024, 3:00 a.m.
A glossy black
hearse outside Last Tuesday Society, a London bar that doubles as a
museum, displayed funeral wreaths spelling out the theme of the evening —
“CRY” — in white carnations.Bompas & Parr
Emily
Shave cried at least 100 times in 2023. She cried the most in November —
28 times. And only about 4 percent of her tears were happy ones; most
of the time she cried over serious things, including an amicable but
major breakup and general anxiety about being a young, broke human in
the modern world.
Shave,
a graphic designer in Leeds, England, knows these details because she
decided to track her tears all through the year and then look at the
data, “just because I find it really interesting to see information
about myself.” She was inspired by Wrapped, the annual readout that
Spotify provides of all the music you’ve listened to on the service over
a year.
She
had criteria — just welling up didn’t count, it had to be actual tears
on cheeks — and she had her Notes app. At the end of the year, she
collated the data in a presentation for her 14,000 TikTok followers. It
has now been watched almost 19 million times on TikTok alone.
Welcome
to my 2023 crying Wrapped 🥳 I cried (minimum) 100 times in at least
11 locations, over a lot of things. Its great to see the stats! 🥲 Guess
which month my breakup was in 😅🥲 On to 2024! New Years or New Tears
amiright #spotifywrapped#cryingwrapped2023#cryingwrapped#2023wrapped#newtears
“It
was really encouraging to see how many people related,” she says. Many
commenters expressed surprise at how much she cried, whether that was
too much or not enough. “I think the funniest comment I got was from the
[mental health] charity Mind which commented, ‘Rookie numbers.’”
Shave
thinks her presentation went viral for a few reasons. Her
matter-of-fact delivery reassured people that you could cry a lot and
still be OK; weird presentations are endlessly shareable right now; and,
of course, revealing information about a nearly universal but always
deeply personal behavior invites people to think about themselves.
But it’s also possible that crying itself is having a moment.
Last
July, 32-year-old Kiara McGowan of Washington, D.C., went on a TikTok
quest to make crying in public as socially acceptable as sneezing. That
earned her a profile in The Washington Post; in January, she gave her top tips for effective crying to Washingtonian,
including “scheduling” her sob sessions. More recently, 22-year-old
model and actress Kaia Gerber told stop-motion puppet interviewer Lauren
Caspian of Peacock’s NPR parody show “In the Know” that crying in the
shower is “one of [her] favorite things.” And in London this year, as
#DryJanuary kept people out of the pubs, #CryJanuary tried to usher them
back in with the promise that shedding tears into one’s beers might
actually make them feel better.
Could 2024 be the Year of Tears?
On a recent Wednesday evening, a glossy black horse-drawn hearse (sans horses) stood outside The Last Tuesday Society,
an East London bar that doubles as a museum. Inside the carriage,
resting atop a presumably empty wooden coffin, stood funeral wreaths
spelling out “CRY” in white carnations. And inside the bar — a red
velvet warren of taxidermy animals, medical oddities, broken toys, art
fashioned from human hair, mummified fairies, and ersatz mermaids —
people were trying to do just what the wreaths directed.
The
bar was hosting a cocktail party to celebrate #CryJanuary, an
initiative of Bompas & Parr, a London-based experience design
studio. Sam Bompas, a cofounder of the studio, says #CryJanuary was
meant to counteract the potentially isolating and overly pressure-packed
aspects of “new year, new you” resolutions.
“A
better strategy by far is being together and crying with one another
over a drink,” he says. #CryJanuary is an invitation to forgo (or at
least temporarily suspend) the easily broken promises of #DryJanuary and
instead embrace sloppy, boozy tears — to get drunk, get messy, and let
it all out. And just to be extra, #CryJanuary is running through the end
of February.
To
help things along on this Wednesday night, the playfully lugubrious
party featured a trio of absinthe-based specialty cocktails designed to
evoke (not emulate) death and an exhibition on death-themed
fin-de-siècle Parisian cabarets. Visitors were asked to reflect on
death, dying, and other experiences typically coded as negative — but,
of course, in a fun way. In addition to the cocktails, there were vegan
“funeral biscuits” to snack on, a sweet and modern twist on a Victorian
tradition; and little black coffins to bedazzle in the style of your
choosing.
A participant at a #CryJanuary event in London captured one of her tears.Bompas & Parr
Bompas
& Parr also commissioned what the founders billed as “London’s
Largest Tear Catcher,” a gilded glass bottle with a stopper to catch the
tears of #CryJanuary participants and visitors to the exhibition. (The
question of whether there are larger tear catchers outside London
remains unanswered.)
This
may, in fact, be the first time a “tear catcher,” or, as creative
antique sellers call them, “lachrymatories,” has actually been used to
capture tears. Romantic lore had it that ancient Greeks would bottle
their tears in tiny vials and leave them in the tombs of their loved
ones, a practice that Victorians, with their dedication to elaborate mourning practices, allegedly mimicked. In reality, there is no evidence that either culture saved their tears,
and the bottles peddled in antique shops likely just held perfume. In
any case, if tears weren’t naturally arriving at The Last Tuesday
Society, guests could avail themselves of an old actors’ trick — menthol
balm applied just under the eyes — for help. The studio plans to turn
the collected tears into salt and give it, in tiny sachets, to those who
contributed to the vessel. “We’ll be working to sterilize it all so it
becomes a low-risk product,” Bompas assured me.
This is why you cry
Ultimately,
thinking about sad things at the weird bar didn’t actually produce any
real tears from me and produced vanishingly few from anyone else. But it
made me wonder: What’s the point of crying?
Humans
cry three kinds of tears: Basal tears, which keep the eyes lubricated;
reflex tears, in response to an irritant such as dust, smoke, or menthol
balm; and emotional or psychic tears, the interesting ones that arrive
in response to the first 15 minutes of “Up,” slamming your fingers in
the car door, and weddings. We share basal and reflex tears with other
species, but emotional tears are, as far as we know, unique to humans.
Their purpose is not obvious — Charles Darwin claimed that they didn’t
have one — and research into emotional crying is in its infancy.
What
we’ve learned so far is that crying’s job is, in some circumstances, to
make us feel better. It can work to reduce anxiety in a few ways. At
the onset, crying seems to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system to
cue up that famous fight-or-flight response. But as the crying
continues, that activation can induce a counterresponse from the
parasympathetic nervous system, ultimately bringing down your heart
rate, slowing your breathing, and restoring internal equilibrium. Crying
is also associated with the release of oxytocin, everyone’s favorite
feel-good neurochemical; and endogenous opioids, the pain-suppressing
chemicals that we humans naturally have.
Crying
on its own can make us feel better, but it’s also a means of social
communication — a signal to those around you that you need comfort. And
for the most part, people to tend to respond to the tears of others with
compassion. One study from 2021
found that responses to seeing someone crying were largely the same
across 41 countries, although the degree of compassion exhibited toward
the crier depended on whether the individual was seen as part of the
viewer’s group. Even more interesting, humans seem to be primed to
respond compassionately to tears even when they’re not being shed by
other humans. Another study from 2021
found that when subjects were shown images of animals — cat, dog,
horse, chimpanzee, and hamster — with tears digitally added to their
faces, they perceived them as friendlier and less aggressive than
animals without tears. This and other research suggests that tears act
as a kind of social glue.
It’s
also possible that the beneficial effects of crying are intensified in
supportive group settings such as #CryJanuary nights in a London bar.
Every few years, an op-ed
or a magazine, or lately a social media influencer, makes the case for
crying as a kind of emotional maintenance. Before Kiara McGowan, for
example, there was Hidefumi Yoshida, a Japanese “tear teacher” who encouraged people to cry as therapy; before Yoshida, there were Japanese “cry clubs”
(rui-katsu), where repressed salary-men could listen to sad music,
watch sad movies, and cry together. The phrase “a good cry” has been
around for at least 200 years. Maybe it’s starting to feel like now is a
good time for one?
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is a freelance journalist living in England. She did not cry at all during the reporting of this story.
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