When Healing Doesn’t Come with Tears
A few nights ago, I was sitting with a friend, the kind of friend who’s been walking a path eerily similar to mine. We were talking—half-laughing, half-serious—the way people do when they’re trying to untangle the mess inside their own heads. And then it slipped out. “Why can’t we cry?” The room went quiet. Not the heavy kind of silence, more like the kind where two people realize they’ve been holding the same unspoken thought. We both knew the pain was there, lingering like a dull ache. But the tears? The breakdowns? The dramatic “letting it all out”? They never showed up. For a second, we wondered if something was wrong with us. Healing, at least in every movie ever made, looks like sobbing into tissues, collapsing into someone’s arms, or staring at the ceiling with swollen eyes. Crying is supposed to be the proof that you’re processing it all. So if we weren’t crying… were we even healing? But the longer we talked, the clearer it became: maybe the absence of tears was...