—
I’m not going to lie: I’ve cried a lot in my lifetime. Crying has helped me cope with a lot of pain. But I haven’t cried much in a long time. I get choked up more than a lot of men do, but rarely these days do I allow myself to really let it out. We’ll see if this essay changes that.
I’ve had a lot of things to cry about. Though I was born, in some ways, extremely lucky—being born a white, middle-class male gave me a lot of privilege, though I didn’t know it for a long time—I always knew that I was different, long before I knew that I was Autistic and gay. For the first eighteen years of my life, I was often treated by peers like they didn’t want me to exist.
But another way that I was lucky was that I always had music to comfort me. My parents encouraged me to develop my interests, including my obsessive interest in popular music history. Today I can name a musical event for every year from now back to 1911, and though I didn’t realize just how capacious my brain was growing up, I spent a lot of time absorbing often problematic narratives of music history from the likes of Rolling Stone magazine, VH1, PBS, and other media.
Music has always been the most prominent mechanism to help me feel a lot of necessary emotions in my life. At my small high school, we had baby pictures on our senior yearbook pages, and mine was of me happily in a trance, standing by a shelf of vinyl records. Music has always been my sanctuary, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been something that I could share easily with others.
No one else seemed to enjoy or feel music in the way that I did. I was misdiagnosed as severely Autistic at age four, though I was more authoritatively diagnosed as on that spectrum around age eleven. I remember my parents meeting with professionals about it and explaining how I obsessed about how to rank different singers as my favorites.
Crying was also a pretty constant companion growing up. My first day of school in kindergarten, I cried the whole day so loudly that it disturbed other classes. I remember crying a lot in fifth grade when I had my first real experience with depression; I cried about things significant and not, including when I found out that a mathematical formula I’d found on my own was common knowledge.
I got a lot of crap later in middle school for being overweight and having “man boobs,” and I cried when I got into verbal fights with people. I’m sure that some might say that I was “too sensitive,” but what that argument fails to recognize is that Autism makes me more sensitive, and I have no reason to apologize for it. And fuck anyone who tells me otherwise.
When I was thirteen, a popular song, Mary J. Blige’s “No More Drama,” came out, and though I knew that I couldn’t understand her pain as an African American woman, that song resonated deeply with me. When she sang, “I don’t want to cry no more,” I felt that sentiment down to my bones. Again, I was lucky, but being Autistic and realizing around that age that I was gay, and all the bullying that went along with both, made life extremely difficult.
◊♦◊
And high school was worse. I was trying to come into my own—as we all do around that age—and failing miserably at being heard and understood. And I acknowledge that I was self-centered and opinionated, so it’s not that I was blameless, but students were so cruel that it hurt people close to me, which I’ll say more about shortly.
I remember walking up and down those school halls with headphones on for long stretches of time, going into class and being bullied when some teachers did nothing about it, and—gratefully—also having some extraordinary teachers and staff who supported me tremendously when I worried that I was a burden.
I remember crying the day before graduation because I’d made no real, close friends my whole time in high school. That hurt to realize because as much as I’d internalized about my lack of self-worth, I still knew that I had been deeply misunderstood and that I had something to offer people.
And shortly after I started college, I found out that people close to me had been severely affected by how I was treated at school and elsewhere. I remember one person telling me how they had been binge eating for years because they couldn’t stand seeing me in so much pain, though I hadn’t overtly told anyone what was going on.
So, to say the least, college was a shock. There were some key moments in my life that occurred at college when I didn’t cry. But the first time I ever felt overwhelmed by appreciation happened after I was terrified to talk to a friend about why my being gay meant that I couldn’t agree with some of his politics. He sent me the following e-mail after I said I wanted to listen to music together:
Josh,
whats up? in thinking about our conversation last night i wanted to say a few things that I didnt get to. the first being that I want you to know how valuable you are and how incredible a contribution you make to this campus and our world. i cant stress enough how so many people i know think so highly of you and value you as a friend and an intellectual. i want you to know that and remember it because it is true. as to your proposition to listen to music- yea definitely. but we should definitely chat sometime monday, before [choir] will probably work. lets touch base at some point soon and figure it out. thanks josh, you’re a great guy and i hope you know it.
Do you understand why I would’ve been shocked? I told him a few days later how I cried because I’d never felt appreciated in my whole life—I was nineteen at the time—and he listened and said, “You’re a star; like, you’re an asset to this community.” I didn’t know how to react.
◊♦◊
A year later, I had the most significant moment of my life to date related to music, when I played my first original song that I was proud of, about my Autism, at a big campus event.
It’s a brutally honest song, and I thought people wouldn’t like it because it was too self-centered, but the crowd at my college loved it, and I’ll never get over how all these people told me that they could relate to my lyrics. You can read more about that moment here, but there’s something that I realized recently: I could’ve used that moment to say that I had written that song about being Autistic.
I remember singing the song with my guitar, and when I was done, everyone and their mother was standing up and cheering—some were crying—for my song in which I exposed a lot of my insecurities and still triumphed, and I walked offstage with my face turning red from not having been able to expect that reaction. I don’t regret anything from that night, but I sometimes wonder how much more powerful it would have been if I had come back onstage and said, “I need to say that I wrote that song about being Autistic/on the Autism spectrum.” I didn’t cry that night, but I would have if I’d gone back on that stage to say that.
I didn’t cry during some of the other biggest moments of my life, like when I came out to my freshman class the first week of college or when I got a standing ovation from my class when I walked at graduation.
But there were other times when I did cry. I sang an original anti-suicide song for a big crowd the night after a friend had killed himself on campus, and I think just about everyone, including me, broke down at the end. And then, a few months later, after I’d finished up my studies on that campus, I came back and this guy who I didn’t know cared about me ended up basically saving my life two nights after the closest I’ve ever come to a suicide attempt. I sure cried then, and I sometimes still cry about moments like that. Like when, four years after that night with that friend, I heard Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” in a coffee shop and couldn’t help being moved at that moment, especially with its line, “Thank God my music’s still alive!”
I’ve sometimes avoided crying, though, to numb pain through other means, no matter how much actual pleasure was involved. I’ve often used music to avoid breaking down with everything that I’ve been through, but this leads me into one of my favorite lines from Paul Simon: “Sometimes, even music cannot substitute for tears” (from “The Cool, Cool River”).
Then, of course, there have been times when music has helped me feel necessary emotions, including with crying. I have friends who talk about how feeling emotions is a sometimes painful “gift” once they stop numbing their issues through drugs, alcohol, or whatever means they choose.
For me, music can serve both to numb pain and help me deal with pain. To paraphrase something that jazz musician Wynton Marsalis said on one of those music documentaries I watched religiously as a kid, music doesn’t take you out of the world; it puts you into the world—except, in my experience, it does both.
And with that, I wanted to name some very personal choices for songs that make me cry and help me deal with the necessity of staying present in the world. Feminist author, bell hooks, writes in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love that patriarchy teaches men to suppress their emotions and feelings in unhealthy ways, so in the spirit of recognizing how feeling my uncomfortable emotions has helped me, I will write about some more songs that make me cry and moments when they made me feel emotions that I needed to feel.
So here are some moments when I cried to particular songs:
“Tony,” Patty Griffin, played in my headphones in a bookstore
I relate deeply to music with direct, emotional lyrics, and no singer-songwriter’s work moves me as deeply as that of Patty Griffin. Songs like “Go Wherever You Wanna Go,” “That Kind of Lonely,” “Top of the World,” and others can hit me right in the heart, but I could never have prepared for the punch of “Tony.” Fair warning, these lyrics are not for the faint of heart:
“I hated every day of high school
It’s funny, I guess you did, too [. . .]
They wrote it in the local rag
‘Death comes to the local fag’
I guess you finally stopped believing that any hope would ever find you
I knew that story, I was sittin’ right behind you
Hey, Tony, what’s so good about dyin’?
Think I might do a little dyin’ today
He looked in the mirror, saw that little faggot staring back at him
Pulled out a gun, and blew yourself away”
Needless to say, I’ve been there, and when I first heard the song in 2007, I almost broke down when it played in my headphones in a bookstore.
“He Heals Me,” India.Arie, played on a mix CD from a friend
A friend dedicated this song to me on a mix after she’d disclosed something personal, minus what she called “the romantic undertones,” and when I listened to it, I did cry. It’s a good song for kind men to listen to when they take themselves and their deeds for granted.
“Way Over Yonder,” Carole King, sung a cappella by me at a rally
At a Take Back the Night march against sexual violence in the town of my college, I read something tearful that I wrote for a survivor friend of mine, and then I sang this song a cappella and was crying throughout. It’s not one of the best songs on Tapestry, one of my favorite albums ever, but it is one of the most meaningful to me, because way over yonder, that’s where I’m bound—some place better.
“You Are Not Alone,” Michael Jackson, played over and over in my dorm room and later in my hometown
The last two minutes of this song more than justify the three or four minutes of boredom that precede it. I played this song over and over in my dorm room the night a friend died, and a few months later when I was back home living with family and desperately unhappy. I walked the suburban streets I grew up on blasting that song in my headphones over and over, looking at the sky, hearing it as a message from those I’d lost.
“I Will Always Love You,” Dolly Parton, played at a Dolly Parton concert
Dolly Parton has to be one of the greatest country singer-songwriters of all time, and whatever you think of her outlandish persona, this song, most famously sung by Whitney Houston, is a knockout. I saw Dolly perform this song in 2005 (truth be told, she was lip-synching), and at the end, a family member I was with said, “This is my song to you.” And I lost it.
Pete Seeger, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” sung in a group singalong after Seeger’s death
I grew up on folk music, and though I mostly listen to this song these days through the Byrds’ 1966 folk-rock cover, folk icon Pete Seeger’s song, adapted from the Bible, can move me in just about any context. At the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in 2014, after Seeger’s death, I was singing along with the words when my voice suddenly went silent and I got really choked up as the group sang, “A time for love, a time for hate/ A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
I hope it’s not too late. And yes, I did get choked up just now, so this essay has succeeded in getting me to feel some necessary emotions.
◊♦◊
And for anyone who could use this, this song is something I wrote for someone in need. The lyrics are on the YouTube page if you have trouble understanding them.
—
What’s your take on what you just read? Comment below or write a response and submit to us your own point of view or reaction here at the red box, below, which links to our submissions portal.
◊♦◊
Sign up for our Writing Prompts email to receive writing inspiration in your inbox twice per week.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
—