“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”
Psalm 56:8

I’ve cried so much in the last year. It’s almost unbelievable.

There was a time in my life I naively thought that if I could only get my OCD under control, I would never be sad another day in my life.

Alas, I’ve been in OCD remission for nearly a decade, and I’ve been drowning in tears for the last year and a half. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are the same months I have attempted online dating.

(Sidenote: I’m in Duluth this week, on a writing-reading-resting retreat, and everywhere I look I am reminded that I was here around this time last year, still unaware that I was about to undergo the first round of that strange, ugly, ambiguous grief called ghosting, which would occur the Saturday before Memorial Day but which I wouldn’t realize until the Tuesday after it.)

I can’t seem to quit crying, certainly not since 45 was elected, not since I started online dating, for the entirety of 2018 thus far, and especially since I started new pain meds. You know how construction sites have those signs that brag, “We’ve gone 87 days without a lost time accident”? Well, my sign would read, “I’ve gone ZERO days without crying.” And it would stay that way.

Tonight I read about tears online. There are three kinds, did you know? Basal tears are the ever-present moisture in our eyes. Reflex tears are the kind that clear out threats: smoke, onions, dust. It’s the emotional tears (or psychic tears) that are the ones that come after overwhelming emotions.

It starts in the brain; then the endocrine system triggers hormones in the ocular area. Studies have shown that the make-up of emotional tears is different than reflex tears, which are 98% water. Emotional tears have hormones that indicate high stress levels, along with endorphins, a natural painkiller called leucine enkephalin.

Does any of this matter?

I hope all of it does.

All of it.