Jacques' Lament

I had an amazing time at a party this weekend, but right in the middle of the party, I had a big old cry. I had a big anxiety attack, and was held by my partners.

Once I had managed to regulate again, one of them told me “Just in case one of those voices in your head is now piping up, nobody even noticed apart from us.”

I mulled that over for a moment.

The old song popped into my head, “Een man mag niet huilen” (A man isn’t supposed to cry) by Jacques Herb.

I never took it to be prescriptive. To me, it always sounded like a man lamenting the cage that being a man in the 70s forced him to live in. Never to show weakness or grief, to always be strong and steady. Stoic, even when the worst happens.

There was a time in my life when I would indeed have felt deeply embarrassed to be crying in public like that, but I found that I really didn’t care any more.

These past weeks, my tear ducts have been getting a thorough work-out as I processed my recent breakup. I’m human, I have emotions, and sometimes they need to come out.

I cry. Deal with it.

It can still be hard to reach my emotions sometimes, as they do like to bury themselves deeply under a thick layer of rationalisation. But, at least in that moment at Booty Call, I felt completely safe to express what I felt.

As I wrote about before, the Department of Toxic Masculinity still writes plenty of memos in my brain, but I’m happy to feel that at least this particular desk is no longer manned.