This one is dedicated to the moon in Cancer, where it’s stationed on my birth chart, and where it’s fully lit up today, January 13th, 2025. Written last Summer, when, now that I think of it… the sun was also in Cancer. It’s clearly a theme. Emotive water signatures, ruining uncomfortable and performative parties since the dawn of time…
Sometimes water pours from my eyes involuntarily and I look for its source in my body but can’t find it anywhere inside of me. Then I look at your face, and your dry eyes, cheeks that haven’t been watered for ages, and realize these tears are yours.
I used to cry every day going to school in the morning as a kid. An early mourning ritual. I don’t know how my mom did it. There’s VCR tapes from the 90’s where I’m balling my eyes out amongst the flower girls at a wedding. On the surface it looks like I’m the one ruining the atmosphere, but I think I was just the weather girl. Picking up unspoken currents from the ether. Confused by the discrepancies between what I sensed and how things appeared to be. I cried at parties. During vacations with friends. Cried myself to sleep imagining my parents being kidnapped downstairs. I cried in church. In the supermarket. On my bicycle. Hiding in toilet stalls.
In my early thirties there were a few years where I cried every single consecutive day. If there had been an app for that I would have gotten a record level tear-streak. It was a perpetual heartbreak carousel that just kept on spinning. A mixture of my own tears and the ungrieved pain of others. Like I was channeling the sadness of everyone that couldn’t. And there was so much of it waiting in line to be processed during those purging years, it often felt like trying to drain a bottomless well.
High sensitivity, they say. “She just feels everything very strongly.” And it’s alright with me, you know. I rarely feel embarrassed about it anymore. Just sometimes a little awkward when I try to be as confidently aloof as my company, but can’t, for the life of me, muster the same level of coolness.
“You are better off,” he says, “you don’t have to live with all of these repressed emotions.” I pause for a moment. But. I do… You see? I am living with your repressed emotions. We all are. Everything you do not feel ends up pouring down someone else’s face. This is just the physics of interdependence. And maybe I’m a canary in that coal mine. “Ugh, she’s tearing up again… must be approaching a dense and uncharted psychic atmosphere, do we back-out of here, or unpack this shit?” If you push your pain down it inevitably rises up somewhere else, and often with the people you love most. I’ve lived a life working overtime processing everyone’s unmet grief in the room. Underpaid. Very few benefits.
I would not oppose a motion to establish a more equal division of emotional labor.
Tear up to capacity
At the altar of our liberation
Behold this glass bowl shrine
Filled with liquid sacrifice
And leap beyond what limits you
To offer water from your eyes
* I want to acknowledge that facing repressed emotions can seem absolutely terrifying sometimes AND point out there there are containers where you can be witnessed and supported in that process. It’s the work I do with people in Clarity Sessions, and the work many others do in therapeutic spaces. It’s possible. And it makes a difference.
* I thought I stole the line “leap beyond what limits you” from a Rilke poem, but found I merely paraphrased it: see an improperly spaced version of the poem here.
* The sound I can’t help thinking about with that last line: here
* The playlist that I listened to as I was writing this last Summer: here
Yvet Youssef 