On and off all day, I have been crying.
I get worried when I feel physically bad for more than a day or two (I’m on Day 3) and then I have a crying symptom on top of that.
A few years ago, my surgeon looked at me sternly and told me sadness was a serious symptom to which I needed to pay attention. She didn’t mean that I was depressed and that depression was serious (though I was, at the time, mildly, and of course depression is serious); she meant that in her experience, when Mary Fons gets sick, Mary Fons doesn’t always run a fever but she oftentimes gets very sad and bursts into tears multiple times a day.
Today, I burst into tears four times. Okay, five, because I just did it again.
Do the crying jags mean I’m sick not with a cold but with something else? My guts have felt strange lately but it’s so hard to tell. I’ve changed my diet recently; is that why I feel bad? And certainly there are perfectly good, totally reasonable and seemingly unrelated reasons to cry, cry, cry:
— My aunt is very sick and the fate of my cousins is uncertain
— I feel a terrible nostalgia for my sisters and my mom and Iowa
— People in every part of the country learn how to quilt on public television and I have taught people how to quilt on public television and I learned how to read with help from public television and my president wants to kill public television and this makes me so sad I cannot bear it, I cannot
— I must admit that I feel overwhelmed by work and school
May I ask a favor?
Is it okay to come to you and just burst into tears? I strive on the ol’ PG to offer content of substance. I strive to be precise and topical and entertaining and thought-provoking and I desperately want to make you smile. But I almost didn’t write to tonight because I feel so terribly sad and then I thought, “Well, maybe that’s why you ought to write.”
There are vulnerable posts and there are vulnerable posts. This is the latter.