In search of a good, therapeutic cry

I'm having "heartache" again. I've been getting mysterious but annoying chest pain for roughly the past four years during times of stress, and it's so not worthy of a whole blog post, but I don't know how to make it go away so I figured I'd try writing.

The first time I got "heartache" was in 2004 about a week after Pants went off to Officer Candidate School. I was pulling long commutes to a very stressful (but good) job, and planning our wedding and simultaneous relocation only a few months away, and drinking extravagant amounts of coffee. My shoulders had risen to ear level and the muscles had hardened and clenched so much that patches of my scalp would go numb for long periods. I was getting headaches from grinding my teeth, and all my nails were chewed and picked down to raw, pink stumps.

In other words, I was a lovely calming presence who didn't at all need a firm shaking and a large martini.

One day at work, shortly after Hurricane Ivan had stomped all over Pants and his terrified, half-starved OCS classmates and destroyed our future hometown, I started having chest pains, like someone had walked up and socked me right in the sternum-- in fact, right in the manubrium, a term I inexplicably remember from high school anatomy.* Everything I'd ever heard about having chest pains indicated that it was Bad, so for once, I actually disengaged myself from the permanent ass grooves in my squeaky work chair and went to a minor emergency center.

(* Mrs. Jacobs, if you're out there, you gave me a C but you're my hero. You taught me so much medical Latin, and the day you came tip-toeing over in your squeaky shoes and told me that mine was the most delicately dissected rat brain you'd ever seen, and then plunked it into a bottle of preservative, I positively glowed.)

Minor emergency centers, in my experience, are usually leisurely places with large waiting rooms, like the broad, stagnant places in a stream where debris eddies, lingers, spins, and waits for an indeterminate time before finally catching the current and moving on again. Even if, say, you are suffering the acute misery of a urinary tract infection, you will linger and suffer with the rest of the lingering and suffering readers of old issues of Parenting magazine until someone remembers you in your purgatory and at last calls your name.

But not, as it turns out, if you're experiencing chest pains. Chest pains are the golden ticket that whisk you right through the double doors and in to see a chipper, young Asian doctor, who will palpate, thump, probe, and squeeze various parts of you while asking a dizzying variety of questions. As it turned out, every test came up fine until she asked me if perhaps I was under any stress at home or at work, to which I replied, "Not that I'm aware of," and then suddenly, to both our surprise, burst into hiccuping tears.

After I'd explained briefly about the situation with Pants, the wedding, and the move, she laughed and said "I think what you've got is heartache," and advised that I try to relax a little.

Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant maker of animated Japanese children's movies-- Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle are two of my favorites-- and his approach to children's animation is refreshingly anti-Disney. For instance, none of his characters are either all good or all bad, and all are shown to be capable of change, in contrast to Disney films where the moral line is drawn with fierce and unrelenting certainty. Other themes in Miyazaki movies include the spiritual and emotional benefits of performing daily chores (I would have hated that as a kid, but as an adult I find it comforting, and am suddenly grateful for my parents' long daily "to do" lists). And yet another yet recurring theme is the benefit of a good, soul-cleansing cry. At least once in each movie, the protagonist walks off into a meadow or crouches down in a private corner and bawls, just open-mouthed, barking wails. Soothing music plays, and eventually the protagonist sniffles a little, wipes his face on both his sleeves, and goes back to face the problem.

I think this is what I need to do. I need to have a good wail, with the snot and the tears, and the fragments of words. Dane Cook, by the way, has a hilarious bit in his routine about having a good, huge cry-- the lengths you go to to hide it, the things you say mid-cry, the sad life events you'll think up just to keep crying, and just how good it feels.

Think I may give it a try.