When I am feeling a particular emotion, I find it very soothing to go down a rabbit hole on it. In this case, I’ve been going down a bit of a weep hole after bit of a sobby week. I learnt the term ‘Weep Hole’ when visiting Lily Cox Richard’s brilliant installation at MASS MoCA.
A weep, a weep hole, or a weep-brick is a small opening that allows water to drain from within an assembly.
So essentially a device to let bricks cry.
Crying looks a lot like snowflakes when put under a microscope, so’s definitely the most wintery of the bodily functions, and therefore very fitting for our first post of December.
There are three types of tears:
Basel Tears
We cry 5 to 10 ounces of these puppies a day, due to dust or debris. In other words the Smoke Get in your Eyes by the Platters genre of crying.
Basel tears under a microscope
Reflex tears.
These happen when we cut onions or when ‘Bugs Get in Your Eyes’ (sung to the tune of the Platters). These tears are 98% water and 100% gorgeous!
Reflex tears under a microscope
Emotional or Psychic (!!) tears.
Unlike basel tears you don’t produce these automatically - they simply must be brought on by watching the final scenes of E.T, or having your heart broken, and from there, your limbic system — the part of your brain that regulates emotions — sends a signal to your brain’s message system to activate your lacrimal glands to produce tears. These tears contain proteins and hormones, including the neurotransmitter leucine enkephalin, a natural painkiller that is released when the body is under stress. Tears of sadness are thought to relieve stress and pain.
Tears of grief under a microscope
Scientists believe that emotional tears have the evolutionary purpose of signaling to others that you are in need of help. In fact:
One article on the symbolism of tears in art described crying as a liminal space which I thought was a deeply interesting take:
As an extruded liquid, tears cross the bodily boundary of inside and outside. They flow from the realm of the invisible to that of the visible, and from the hidden or private sphere to the public sphere. Thus, in an important sense, tears are liminal; they move and exist betwixt and between two distinct states or spaces, and therefore they are "natural symbols" of transitions or passages.
Tears take the invisible state inside your body and show it to the outside world.
I personally like to cry alone in my clothing cupboard and if I hear someone coming I wipe the snot off my nose, brush down my jeans and pretend I was looking for a hat, BUT if you’re in the mood to share your invisible insides with others, may I recommend the crying cafes of Japan. Called rui-katsu (meaning “tear seeking”), groups meet to watch sad movies or commercials and are available to anyone who wants to let out their emotions.
Medieval Japanese poets often equated tears with the dew, employing the poetic conceit of "dew on one's sleeves," for instance, to suggest the tears shed by a sensitive person. It also had me singing this song as ‘lonely dew drops.’
There is a beautiful NYT Op-Doc about Hidefumi Yoshida, a self-described tears teacher:
There has been a lot of mentions in the After Skool Substack recently about the latest TikTok trends geared toward crying. Among them, a viral video by mayarose2798, who does a quarterly presentation on where and when she has cried in the last few months, entitled ABC - “Always be Crying”:
A TikTok trend I am completely fascinated by, and have of course tried myself is crying make up. Zoe Kim Kinealy introduces the trend by saying “you know how we look good when we cry?” and then goes on to tell you how to get the look even if you’re not in the mood to sob.
When I sent this video to my good friend Jack Pendarvis, he told me he was going to save his bucks on make up and get the look the old fashioned way:
For fake heartbreak, you blur the edges of your lips to soften them, then put peachy red powder around your eyes, cheeks and nose, glide liquid glitter on your bottom lash line to give the illusion of tears, then gloss anywhere you want “shine” (sobby snot tears), curl your lashes, pop on some lipgloss and you’re ready to go out and get some sweet sweet empathy baby!
One could brand this trend as Crocodile Tears™ or Superficial Sympathy™:
The expression crocodile tears means false or affected tears and originated from an ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while consuming their prey, weeping for the very victims they were eating.
So probably best not get too close to folks sporting cry make-up (dibs on turning this concept into a horror movie).
If you’re interested in the ultimate Zagat guide to crying, Reddit has some great ones (this one is LA specific). The top picks are the Burbank Ikea and the beach at night:
Are we all just crying out there at night? Is that what everyone is doing?
Yes.
There is speculation that this new wave of sadness on the internet is simply because teens having more access to social media platforms than the generations before them. Writer Tamim Alnuweiri observes: “When I was a teenager, I also stuck my head against the window and pretended I was in a music video when it was raining, but their version of this is much more public.”
There are, however, many reasons for us all to be devastated right now, and if you are at a loss for how to name your sadness, Depths of Wikipedia has a few suggestions:
And there are many ways in which our sadness is expressing itself - such as cry make up, the #sadgirlwalk, crying about break ups on TikTok and Apocalypse Pop - pop music described as the soundtrack to the climate crisis. We’ve touched before on how sadness used to be the ‘in’ emotion to feel, and it looks like it might be back in style.
I recently read the book ‘When Elephants Weep’ about the emotional lives of animals, and while there is much speculation in the book about whether elephants cry emotional tears (I have the proof right here):
They do note one emotional moment between two elephant friends who saw each other after a long time. They began by calling to each other from a quarter mile away, then their heads and ears went up, and finally fluid began pouring from their temporal glands, which are small glands between their eye and ear. That sounds a heck of a lot like crying to me.
So whether it be fluid pouring from your temporal glands, water leaking from your brick crevices or a good old fashioned sob while you listen to your apocalypse pop, why not relieve some stress, numb some pain and as the TikTok make up trend confirms, look bloody gorgeous while doing it.
I’m sharing a heartbreak playlist I made a few lifetimes ago to help you get your weep holes flowing. Please feel free to share your preferred sobbing tunes here and I’ll make them into a playlist for next week! Let’s cry our way through all of December!
I adore this & you — I recommend “ur so pretty” by Wasia Project for a good ol’ spiffy sob 🥰
I’m one of those people who cry at everything, so I particularly enjoyed this post! I’m going to start calling my tears lonely dew drops. So poetic.