Live from: crying in public

Alrighty Reader, buckle up because I’m coming in guns blazing this week and the only person we have to blame is the mini Regina George who scoffed at me while I cried behind my sunglasses at the roller rink in Salt Lake City.

There are some obvious reasons to be upset here. One being the possible degeneration of manners in our younger generations. Another being that I was already sweating like John Maher when Miss Swift released Jake Gyllenhaal’s Grave (Taylor’s Version), and did NOT need anyone to be looking at me, let alone an eleven-year-old wearing mascara. But no, Reader. The reason I almost skated all the way back to The Village was not for fear of my own image nor the future of our world. What disturbed me the most is that I, The Village Idiot, was once an eleven-year-old who thought I would never feel the effects of the strange, unseen woes that ailed young women crying in public places.

Clearly, I was mistaken.

You see, Dear Reader, life happens. You grow older, but you also grow younger at the same time. Every time you learn something new you realize there are three more things you can’t seem to figure out. You learn enough to know something is missing, but you’re not smart enough to put your figure on what. One day you’re eleven and scoffing at the woman crying at the roller rink and the next day you’re twenty-four and you simply cannot stop weeping because you fell on your tailbone at the roller rink and now you’re, like, really embarrassed and what if all your friends and your Hot IT Boyfriend™ saw and they think that you’re a total loser because you don’t have a job doing science or math or whatever, you don’t own a couch, and now you can’t even roller skate?

You see, you can’t get smart without getting, like, really dumb. Life exists within a continuum. You can’t be unyieldingly generous without being occasionally taken advantage of. You can’t enjoy the peace and quiet of The Village without being assaulted by the seasonal aroma of cow poop and fertilizer. You can’t be a Taylor Swift fan without being, like, kind of annoying.

And just to be clear, it’s not that I think little girls shouldn’t be mean. For the record, I am very pro mean-little-girl. Truly, I could not name a demographic that does more for our society than the 4’1” spitfire hellions that can tear apart a grown man in a matter of seconds. I just wish I could prepare them for what’s to come—what leads us to becoming the twenty-four-year-old crying at the roller rink. The pent-up misery behind it and the freedom that comes with it.

But we all have to go through that phase where crying in public is super embarrassing to realize it’s actually a testament to self-confidence. In fact, in my Old Age, every time I see a woman crying in public I have so much respect, I nearly fall at her feet.

So, to the teeny tiny Sharpay Evans’ of the world, skip the embarrassment phase and get good at crying now. One day when you get older, you’ll realize crying inside of a Burger King is 1) glamorous, 2) brave, and 3) going to save you money on therapy. Cry when you fall at the roller rink. Cry when you get an email that’s a little inconvenient. Cry when someone gives you a regular Coke instead of a Diet Coke. Cry because you saw a spider! Cry because you saw a butterfly! Cry because you deserve to feel exactly what you feel exactly when you feel it.

You may be mean, but life exists in a continuum, and between you and me, I know you’re actually super sensitive. It won’t make anyone like you less, and if it does, they probably suck anyway.

It’s okay, I won’t tell. I’ve been there before.

XOXO

— The Village Idiot