I've noticed lately in order to be a good writer you must know tragedy. You must write sorrow, pain, guilt, defeat, fear. Writing joy, love, happy ever afters doesn't sell. You need them too, of course, because what is the point of a story with nothing good? But when it comes down to it, we need, we CRAVE to read about the things that make us cry. We crave the release of emotion. The tears, the anger, the remorse, the things we try and hide in our day to day lives are the things that make a story in any art worthwhile.

Why is that?

I think it has to do with the fact that there in those stories, we relieve ourselves of the emotion we hide and swallow everywhere else. We can't cry about that jerk at work because it's a silly thing to cry over, but we can cry because that little boy's dog just died. We can't cry because our parents yet again criticized something we did, but we can cry over the woman in the story getting cancer. We can't scream over someone ignoring our birthday, but we can let ourselves get furious at a wife who sleeps with her husband's boss.

We need to cry and I think that so many people have forgotten that. We need to let those emotions go. We can't go around pent up with all these negative feelings we never let out.

I think my grandma is a perfect example. And no I'm not using her as an example because of my recent falling out with her.

She never cries. Ever. She says crying shows where you're weak and to cry is to be weak.

She is the most angry woman I have ever known. She yells over everything. She rants and raves and her face goes red, but god forbid she cries. (Of course what she doesn't realize is letting someone see where you get angry is a weakness too. Letting ANY emotion show is showing a weakness. She never learned that.)

And I can't help but think, if maybe she wasn't so afraid to cry, that she wouldn't be so angry. That maybe the worst thing a person can do is not show how they feel, no matter what that feeling is. Whether it's anger or fear or hurt, or if it's joy and love. That perhaps our biggest weakness, is the fear of being weak.