how often do you cry?

Well up all the time with little tiny tears sometimes - like weekly - but proper weeping , not for a long time.

around once a day for me, usually to music. the feeling i get after letting some tears roll down my cheeks is unique and one i really like tbh.

full-on weeping is definitely less often for me too, i'd say once in a blue moon.

I get weepy/choked up over really mawkish sentimental shit

pretty much just have my annual cry every Christmas with "It's a Wonderful Life"

a couple of years ago I used to seek out emotionally intense media to make myself cry as a kind of catharsis. But since I've been on sertraline the urge to do that has basically gone.

I get weepy/choked up over really mawkish sentimental shit

Works every time.

Not enough? I used to cry all the time. I’ve now become one of those adults who don’t cry I guess

Having said that I will and can cry over any old shit. Case in point:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ2pDJ9xcxL/

Due to family drama I’ve cried every day for a solid week. But…. I have not yet cried today!

Having trouble feeling anything

I guess the best answer for me is that I cry whenever I feel like crying -- which often is when I am reminded of the great sadness that exists in the world, more often than I cry at a sadness or grief in my own life. Yup, I tear up a bit over mawkish movies, but only when there's a sad kernel of truth, not just because the director is piling on the emotional manipulation with a trowel.

I have a peculiar relationship with the grief I feel about my daughter, now, after her death. Because so much of my grief there was founded in the pain of her daily life and there was never a week of her life that I wasn't aware that her death could come at any moment, it makes for a very complex set of feelings now that her great and admirable soul is freed from her exceptionally imperfect body. But during her life I shed tears aplenty for many years.

around once a day for me, usually to music. the feeling i get after letting some tears roll down my cheeks is unique and one i really like tbh.

― shaking babies (map), Monday, June 22, 2026

I get weepy/choked up over really mawkish sentimental shit

― Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, June 22, 2026

same for me map and Andy, when I'm listening to music or watching films/shows. I think that is crying out of empathy though, which is not the same as crying from grief or being heartbroken

i went like 20 years without crying at all; now i cry at all the mawkish shit too. or if i think too hard about my former cat

i cried at wicked (the musical, not the movie). it was kinda embarrassing

I don't know if anyone remembers it, but there was a remake of The Browning Version in the mid-90s, I saw it once in the theater and never again. But I remember a scene towards the end where Albert Finney breaks down in these intense, choked, painful sobs, like a man that has been holding something inside beneath his cold bluster, for years.. it was far from mawkish or sentimental, but absolutely cathartic and I feel like I wept in sympathy with his character and that performance

uncontrollable crying like a baby is feeling something at a very primal level. the last time i had that was in march when i realized my student loan payments were coming back soon lol. it's silly but it caught me off guard one morning and triggered all this fear and shame related to financial independence and my ability to take care of myself. my partner was there to cry on but he was a little shaken up by it understandably. i've done some work on it since and, yknow, it'll all be fine.

There's UK TV series called Long Lost Family which airs late afternoon here and it's almost comical how well-designed it is for eliciting tears from me pretty much whenever I stumble on it. (eg. mother flees from an abusive husband and only confirms her hunch that he wouldn't hurt the infant son when said son is helped by the producers to track her down in Auckland 50 years later. And endless variations on that sort of thing.)

xp i actually cried when Biden forgave my student loans because they were a certain category of something or other. don't ask me what i did when the republican judges blocked it and now i still have to pay them

Once in a blue moon

It happens rarely, and if I could somehow remember every occasion most of them would be at movies

Three examples I can think of:

Ernest & Celestine
The Mr. Rogers documentary (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”)
Pavements

The first two in a movie theater, the last one at home alone

This belongs in the things you were shockingly old when you learned thread, but somewhat recently I learned that a "blue moon" is what you call the second full moon that occurs in the same calendar month. Because the moon cycle is roughly 28 days compared to 30 or 31 days, a blue moon happens something like once a year, but it's erratic and jumps around.

I cried cathartically about a month ago, no music or movies required.

wish I cried more. I always feel so good for a while after doing so. I think hysterical laughter is a similar release.

Same, if I could do it more often I’d be at least a little happier

agree, a good cry in the shower is quality catharsis.

i probably cry about 6 to 9 times a year, when i'm feeling really really emotionally unwell.

I don't think I've cried in decades. The last time I can remember crying was in junior high school. When I feel sad I don't erupt, I withdraw.

at least once a week I suspect thought I don't track it. that I cry easily is one of my favorite things about myself, I feel I am most myself when I can't help but cry.

i wish i cried more

i cried more in the years leading up to my dad’s death. once all that happened, the rest, the screaming and tears, it was hard to cry afterward. so maybe once every couple months now. crying is good. the world is painful, and crying helps to ward away some of the suffering (the revisiting of the original pain)

crying used to be impossible for me. i was called a “crybaby” a lot as a kid, so i just gradually learned to seal it away. it’s only since coming out (and starting hrt) that i’ve been able to cry regularly, and it is the most wonderful thing in the world. at this point it’s more biweekly. i cried at karaoke the other night singing cassandra jenkins’ “hard drive”

cancer season-ass thread btw

where is the "not enough" option

oh, this is a new take i didn’t realize i had in me. this is pushback to the pushback, very nice: you know when people say they hate western funerals and they much prefer the celebration of life kind of thing? i totally get that, in fact, up until a minute ago i’d say yeah that makes a lot of sense. but you know what also makes sense? crying, mourning and weeping, and lasting pain in a way that freezes the human experience. not for everyone — same as the celebration of life, which is not for everyone — but for some people, sitting in that pain with others in a setting where that’s ok and it’s open and expected, permissible, is an expression of processing pain that is rare and like a life event.

hmm. i lost my point there, but i hope that’s a new take - let’s bring back really fucking sad funerals! mandatory 4 year work leave for any sadness! (i was at a gathering the other day, this reminds me, where someone declared that they were running for president (on an independent party ticket) in 2028)

at 31 i crushed so hard on a guy that i wept uncontrollably several times a day, sometimes for hours at a time, for months on end. it felt so wonderful that i got addicted to the dopamine rush. anything seemed to get me going, lighting a cigarette, riding the train to work or taking out the garbage. if i listened to a song, forget it.
the ex i almost married was the confidante, not the crush. he knew how to pull my heartstrings and floored me so often that i didn’t slow down much as long as we were together.
it’s taken me years to rebuild a life out of the shadow of such a pivotal moment. i cried at every single movie, after many social interactions, lots of songs, sometimes randomly on the subway. there were days of frequent crying with days or weeks of not crying in between.
that period has ended, and the next chapter of my life is already underway. can’t turn it off tbh. it interferes with my ability to function or appear presentable, and i don’t even care.

In my 50s I have been mildly appalled at how easily I choke up trying to describe or refer to something I think is beautiful or admirable, like I'll start the sentence and feel my throat tighten, sigh, here we go again. I'm normally not an emotionally demonstrative person so it's kind of unsettling.

i'm going through some middle age shit atm where i get really really wistful and misty eyed listening to my favorite music

mildly appalled at how easily I choke up … not an emotionally demonstrative person so it's kind of unsettling.

m8

having kids severely skewed my response. i sat in on them watching "the little mermaid" and burst into tears when ariel bids farewell to king triton with the "i love you daddy" line.

I wept like a baby at the end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg recently and my wife spent the rest of the night making fun of me for it. It was a packed cinema and like, I just could not keep myself together when the lights came up. We were both correct. Embarrassing!!!!
Most recently? Pawlikowski's Fatherland hit me. Think I managed to hide it though from wife+friends. I have to stop going to the movies with people.

!!!!

:D

Once in a blue moon.

It was a recent death of a friend, which was a reminder that I can cry, but it was maybe the first time since I cried at a death, when my father died, nearly a decade ago.

But in the last couple of years I have unexpectedly started crying at the odd film. I watched the restoration of Yi Yi a few weeks ago and the last scene with the kid's speech at his granny's funeral made me tear up. The ending of Renoir's Partie de campagne made me slightly tearful too when I caught a rescreen of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvXO1WPJOjI

Yeah, it's weird how once someone important to you dies, it unlocks some ability to cry at the most unlikely times. In the months after my brother died, I thought I would never stop crying. I would lose whole days to just solid crying, and then the sore eyes and headaches and flu-type post-crying aches and pains, and then I would start all over again. And obviously that's all long stopped, but sometimes something can just catch me unawares and pop, here we go again.

I have to stop going to the movies with people.

Mr Trish is one of those robot people who does not cry, and every time we watch a film that he expects me to cry at, he'll keep looking over at me to see if I've started crying, which drives me mad.

I cried for weeks when my cousin died (45, breast cancer, leaving two sons under 10) but when my mom died two years later, I was all out of juice.

I would blubber as a kid when really emotional stuff happened that I didn't know how to deal with: getting threatened by a bully (this was the last thing I should have done), seeing another kid's shitty halloween costume and thinking they couldn't afford something better, various movies/shows (Snoopy Come Home and E.T. were big ones). When I moved as a teenager, I told myself I wasn't going to do that anymore and I basically didn't with a few exceptions over the years (deaths of relatives, etc.). I feel like I'm in a better place in recent years since I recognize how cathartic a good cry can be at the right time.

I put Blue Moon for crying, but I can get a lil choked up at movies and songs if they hit me right. I’m surrounded by sadness in daily life (familial — ailing parents and in-laws, one person who’s perennially on the verge of doing themself in with substances), but those things make me weary more than they make me cry.

A few months ago I would have put myself squarely in the "can't remember the last time" category, but I lost a dear cat recently and it was basically a month of full-on-several-times-a-day weeping, in the weeks leading up to and after. Now I find myself losing it at things that previously might not have gotten to me. I suppose the flood gates are open.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAX20LoVgxE

Cried a little over a month ago when my daughter's friend's mom died from cancer.

I cry during emotional parts of movies. If it's engineered to make you cry, I fall for it every time. But I do try to hide it/play it off, if I'm watching the movie in company. Off the top of my head, the Tir Na Nog scene in Titanic gets me every time. Ditto, the Let It Go sequence from Frozen, which I had to watch over and over and when my daughter was young - tears welling up in their ducts every time.

Last time I straight up bawled was about ten years ago, when my wife and I realized that we weren't in the right place (financially, emotionally, physically) to have another kid. Damn, I'm tearing up a little right now just typing that out! The correct decision, but it hurt(s).

the odd movie scene can get me misty eyed but crying crying has been decades and i couldnt even think what it might have been

not sure i can see myself full crying again in this life tbh

well my daily cry was about great basin rattlesnakes trying to escape wildfires. poor babies ;_;

cancer season-ass thread btw

― ivy., Tuesday, June 23, 2026 3:55 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this did not cross my mind when i started it but of course you're correct.

Fuck, map. That's heartbreaking.

Oh man, every day since Mar 16th, when we lost Jones, my little cat of 19 years. I've worked from home since 2020, and she's been here with me all day, every day, hanging out, sleeping just a few feet away. Her absence is just killing me atm.

but you know what also makes sense? crying, mourning and weeping, and lasting pain in a way that freezes the human experience.

we need to bring back mandatory mourning periods, death wails, etc.

Sympathy for all my fellow cat widowers, it's really rough!

i literally started HRT because i desperately wanted to cry but i couldn't

second puberty was a hell of a roller coaster

turns out i have a lot of _very big_ feels

i definitely think that expressing emotions can be healing... i also feel pretty overwhelmed with grief a lot of the time. part of that is that i've been chronically depressed for more than three years straight now, but part of it is just that, well, there's a lot to grieve. things are bad right now, for me and everyone i know, and i got _very very good_ at dissociating...

i've learned that for me, it's not _how much_ i cry, but _how_ i do it. that there are so many different ways of crying. one of the reasons journaling is good for me is because writing about how i feel really does help the tears come. because of some stuff that happened during second puberty i have a hard time feeling comfortable crying around other people.

the thing is that if i go too long without crying, the emotions come to the surface more and more. i'm more and more fragile. i start avoiding social situations because i'm worried about being able to manage my emotions effectively. i can and have gone on crying jags lasting for hours, where at the end i'm just exhausted and empty and don't feel any better at all. that's not something i want to do.

nah i have to make space for it. get myself away from the endless distractions and pay attention to how i feel, what i want, what i need, what i deserve, what i don't have right now. cuz goddamn yeah i want to cry for everyone and i don't have enough tears for it.

the other thing is that a lot of what busts me open is when people are kind to me. i'm reminded of all the things i could have, if things weren't... well, if things weren't what they are. how much better my life could be, and well, i mean, i'm doing what i can, and i'm going to keep doing what i can.

i should get back to going for walks in the morning. that's what i did for a while, i'd go out for walks and it's nice, the world is nice, and it's so overwhelming, so, i mean, not to get maudlin but beautiful. it's genuinely a beautiful world, yes, for _me_ as well, and i can barely keep from busting open by the time i get back home.

because there's _so much_ vulnerability to crying. and the way i cry... people draw the wrong conclusions about me. i feel deeply. that doesn't mean that my sadness is... i mean it's just something i have to be aware of and express sometimes, when it's safe. if i'm still around when things stop being like they are, i'm sure i'll cry a lot more. right now, it's just enough for me to get by.

oh shit also i'm overdue on my shot, EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. sigh.

I am trying to unlearn the impulse to suppress crying, which I honed as an adolescent boy and am now stuck with. It takes a lot to get watery eyes, much less semi-voluntary face scrunching; actual tears are quite rare. At its most, there’s still more howling than tears. More often, there’s that unconscious pulling back from letting it out.

Crying tends to happen because of overwhelming anxiety or stress rather than sadness, sincr my response to sad things is to freeze. I get too numb to cry, which is maybe why I’m more likely to cry at unexpected things that don’t impact me personally. For example, I’ve never cried during therapy but recently started crying in the middle of a bike ride because I was thinking about a a youtube comment on a nine inch nails video. I think we cry at random things because it’s a way to let out the pent up emotion about everything else, but still, I’d much rather be able to experience those emotions in the present.

I’m on the one a day plan lately after losing my dad this past Thanksgiving. It’s been getting better, but things just catch me sometimes.

I have been mildly appalled at how easily I choke up trying to describe or refer to something I think is beautiful or admirable, like I'll start the sentence and feel my throat tighten, sigh, here we go again. I'm normally not an emotionally demonstrative person so it's kind of unsettling.

― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, June 22, 2026 9:14 PM 

I have the same involuntary response exactly and have to tamp it down because usually under the specific circumstance it feels inappropriate. I'm glad to know you have that feeling too

cuz goddamn yeah i want to cry for everyone and i don't have enough tears for it.

this struck me as very beautiful kate. loved your post. most of the reason i'm crying lately is because something is so urgently beautiful i literally can't hold any more space for it, so i spill over.

to all the grievers though, especially the cat widows, it moves me so much every time i hear about this special love that visits people and animals, so thank you for sharing that here, and i hope the grief eventually turns into some kind of beautiful painting on the wall of your life.

I'm not much of a music-crier, but Cynic have been getting me misty-eyed lately.

Books probably make me cry the most, of all the arts.

Anytime I want to cry, I play “Little Green” by Joni and I’m a blubbering mess.

Yeah that’s a weapons-grade sadness bomb

For me it's "River". Just coming up to Christmas 2018, my dog got really sick and was in the hospital. They let me take him home for a few hours, but we all knew what was coming. When I brought him back up to the hospital, "River" was playing on the car radio. I listened to it as my husband walked Cody back into the clinic and I knew Cody would never come home again, and that I would never be able to hear that song without crying ever again, and both of those things are true.

I'm crying now! Unbelievable! There's actors that would pay through the nose for that kind of trigger. Poor Cody. He was a good dog.

Joni has a lot of tears to answer for.

this struck me as very beautiful kate. loved your post. most of the reason i'm crying lately is because something is so urgently beautiful i literally can't hold any more space for it, so i spill over.

― shaking babies (map), Tuesday, June 23, 2026 6:54 PM (two days ago)

haha thanks it's, uh, gentle giant, actually, gentle giant's song about camus from _octopus_. i used to think it was really corny but i don't know, i look at things from different angles at different times.

idk, it was good to be reminded of this thread. sometimes i wonder, like, what am i doing on the internet, what is the internet even _for_, and then i remember this thread and i put on _blue_ and i just start crying. because she's nothing like me, really, because it's not an album i can connect to. i don't think i've ever been as young as she is on this album. not yet, at least. i'm a girl and i like boys and there are a lot of different ways to feel things. usually i'm more of a nick drake, _pink moon_ kind of girl, but today i don't wanna cry like that. there's so many ways to cry, that's what i've learned. some ways scare me and some of the ways that scare me the most are the best ways. sometimes i cry and i can't tell whether i'm crying or laughing. you know how sometimes... idk if everyone does it, but i'll sometimes let out a choked up cough and it sounds just like a laugh. back in the day, in the Before Time, i used to laugh like... i'd inhale and laugh, not exhale, it was kind of a braying sound, kind of like old Eddie Murphy back in the day but not quite. and now, i don't know... i do laugh a lot, actually, when i get the chance. i think my laughter is beautiful, if that's not too vain to say. it's like pop rocks, it's sparkle like sunlight on water. i've never thought of describing my tears in those words, which... i mean tears are beautiful. sometimes i've taken pictures of myself just to see how i look when i'm really sobbing. thinking i would look, i don't know, pathetic, red-faced, and no actually i look beautiful in that picture. i haven't thought of that picture in months. i didn't realize ... until i said the words, i didn't realize that yeah, i'm beautiful when i cry. nobody's ever told me that. maybe it would sound corny if they did.

i don't know, i think about... that rutger hauer speech about "tears in rain" a lot, the things i've seen and can't put into words, and i don't look at it that way, partly i guess because it's not my time to die and it's never been my time to die, not yet, but whenever that comes, just because something gets washed away doesn't make it less... it makes it more. i don't know if i could live in pdx if i didn't love the rain. it's going to rain tomorrow, i think, and i'm looking forward to it, no matter what kind of rain it is. there are a lot of kinds of rain, too, there's subtropical south florida rain where the sky opens up at precisely 3:00 every day for months and it's the only relief you get, and then there's portland rain, months of this light gray drizzle to where you don't carry an umbrella because you don't need to. it's cool and soft and the smell of petrichor is everywhere, even in the city. i guess the sun has to shine sometimes, but the world i dream of, it's always raining and it's always dark. sometimes soft rain, sometimes hard rain, sometimes hail, and i can just walk outside and see it, feel it, smell it.

anyway it's taken me some time but i think i'm learning to cry like that, finally, and i'm really glad. back when i was getting divorced i did cry like my ex-wife, she'd cry for hours and sounded like a wounded animal, which i guess she was and i guess i'd wounded her, and there was nothing for it. and for months i cried and screamed by myself at all hours and told myself that i was only acting, as if there was someone there to act for. and it scared me, and it had been, you know, 25 years or so since i'd been able to cry at all. sometimes i get tired of... i say look, i'm through puberty, why am i still crying, can i quit crying and just act like a "normal person" who doesn't just need to cry sometimes for no reason she can explain. i guess if i listen to _blue_ i don't need a reason even though the reason i'm crying has nothing to do with the album. i guess that's the good thing about that album.

god, i can't imagine drinking a case of someone and still being on my feet. how fucking weaksauce does someone have to be that one can drink a fucking case of them and not be knocked flat? nobody i've been interested in has been like that, but then again, i'm the world's cheapest drunk.

that was the best post, jfc

everyone says i laugh like a little kid. guileless, explosive laughter. i think i’m most myself when i’m laughing. when i cry i’m just a little more in control than that.