A Little Pinch

Yesterday I exited the music shop with my guitar and a new lesson book excited to learn something fun and new. In the car I went to zip up my polka-dot wallet, but a quarter had wedged itself perfectly enough for the zipper to catch and do that back-wards unzip thing (there has to be a definition that is lacking in my brain) which basically means it’s broken.

At first I was angry. Like, really angry and frustrated at the thing! How could it do this? It holds my money; it knows how much I lack in that department! That emotion quickly bled into me sitting and holding my useless wallet, crying.

Swooping in to calm me down, my girlfriend repeatedly told me that I could use her pretty, sparkly wallet until I got a new one, but I puffed out my lip and whined, “No, I want mine!”

“Well you can’t have yours.”

On top of being mad at this piece of leather breaking, I was upset with myself for being this upset! I mean, how materialistic is that? I try my best to live life in finding happiness from spontaneous road trips downtown with my girlfriend, drinking coffee while doing homework in bed, or the springtime sounds of birds echoing outside at this time.  So how could I be as shallow to cry over a $15 Target wallet? Let alone refuse a FREE wallet.

The issue wasn’t the wallet. Well, okay, I am still bummed that it broke, because it was super cute, and I just got it last month, but there are many cute wallets (including my girlfriend’s) out there!

Some weeks are spent trying to get over with and make it to the weekend where we’ll be able to breathe. Coming up on Wednesday and Thursday this week I knew that if I just made it to Friday I would be relaxed and carefree again. Then the wallet incident happened, and I still had to get home and do homework, and I hadn’t done yoga since Monday, and… overwhelm.

Many times I think that if I ignore the stress it will dissipate on its own, but that doesn’t happen. We have to acknowledge the stress; we have to break stressors down into manageable steps; and sometimes we just have to sit in the car and cry over a broken wallet.

I’m not ashamed (anymore) of getting upset over that, materialistic or not, because I needed the release so I could move on and into my Friday. I had been trying to get over everything I didn’t want to do instead of moving through it and living it, and the universe gave me a little pinch to remind me that this doesn’t work.

We are humans who get overwhelmed, and like I said in my post last night, it’s okay if we have weeks where we cry every night. Crying isn’t a sin and crying isn’t weak: crying is healing.

Until this past year I rarely cried. Maybe a few times a year I would have a break down. Now my body is so used to emitting the water works I cry on a regular basis. It was annoying at first, because I felt that I had lost my strength, my stoic character. But more and more I’m accepting it and being grateful for my weekly (and often daily) crying sessions, because I feel cleaned out and whole at the end of them.

There is a refreshing, purifying experience in letting everything go and just crying it all out. When we come out it’s a little scary, and we’re a little tenderer, but it’s like a restart button. We can more easily see how we got to this point, we can communicate with our emotions more clearly, and we can communicate our emotions to others more clearly. And sometimes we just need the final straw, a little pinch, to finally do it and cry.