when you're *literally* out of tears
the middle-aged urge to cry it all out in the year of our lord 2025
All week, I’d planned on writing a post-vacation post about vacation joys (dill pickle potato chips and spiked blood orange Spindrifts among them), how I am living squarely in my “beach shirt” epoch and what it’s like to no longer feel like a kid visiting your or your partner’s parents, but a full-ass adult who now does all the annoying adult shit they once did. How vacation is changing and what I want out of it is changing and how I don’t yet know what any of it means.
Then, of course, there’s a whole Substack about what it’s like to simultaneously experience simmering rage over traveling with one’s obstinate teen while still grieving said teen’s childhood/caring for a tiny (nice) person, all in real time. The perils of parenting, the non-stop adjustments of aging. Hell, I could’ve written an entire essay on the 1940s twin mattress I slept on and the lingering cruelty it imposed on my back.
But then I came home on Sunday and my right eye started twitching and then it started watering and then I felt sick all over my face and by the time I landed in the ophthalmologist’s (WHY IS THIS WORD SPELLED THIS WAY) office on Wednesday I looked like a snotty red-eyed monster who’d been crying for days, which, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS COUNTRY, I pretty much have.
Like you, I cannot keep up with all the for-shit legislation, nor the myriad cowardly elected ghouls pushing it through. I’m listening to too many podcasts about it. I can’t do anything except these 5 jerk-off calls, yet I remain hypervigilant over all the world-ending nonsense, never at rest.
Everyone’s talking about the same things. We’re trapped in a room wobbling around, screaming at each other, none of us can quite see the door. I’m so mad I’m so mad I’m so sad I’m so sad. Wobble wobble wobble. Again and again.
The oph-tha-mol-o-gist said I have a bacterial infection that looks like pink eye but is not pink eye and also hahahahahah I’ve lost the ability to appropriately make tears. “There’s a lot going on here!” she said, chuckling in that young doctor dealing with a not-young person way. “The dry LA air, allergies, but mostly it’s…hormones and age.”
She recommended a 10-minute nightly session with a compression mask, some drops, to “stay off screens as much as you can.”
The glued-to-the-news hopelessness and despair is clearly not working for me. I’m trying to find my tear-free way.
This essay by the great Amanda Litman (co-founder and president of Run For Something) helped. It’s about finding our path again, feeling inspired, reconnecting to the fucking point of all of this, allowing ourselves the freedom to dream and even (a topic I think about a lot obviously) to feel ambitious again.
“‘Afford to dream’ — phew, what a phrase!,” Litman says. “The time, space, and freedom to dream, to want, to aspire for more — said another way: The capacity to be ambitious.”
On the eve of the 249th birthday of our ridiculous country, I’ll leave you with this from Litman, which managed to light up my dry, all-cried-out eyes just a bit:
“We have to paint a picture of what it might be like when things don’t suck — of what that might open up for us when we have the chance to breathe.”
Happy Fourth, everyone. Here’s hoping you get a chance to breathe easy this weekend, stupid government be damned.
I’ll be back on Monday with a new episode of the Extended Scenes pod.
I just got my fifth stye in as many weeks—after not having a single one since I was like 22. My oph-thal-mologist (I know, weird) uncle said it's likely going to be a bigger problem for me going forward, thanks to aging. Wheee. Already had one round of antibiotics and two rounds of steroidal eyedrops. Like, now we have to worry about our EYELIDS being painful and fucked up and gross, too?? (I feel like the Chris Elliott character in Something About Mary.)
dry eye is the worst! I hope it is not too bad and is manageable. When we look at screens we don't blink as much. Try to look away from your screen and blink every so often, easier said than done.