The first time I was introduced to the idea of suppressing my emotions was in my childhood. I was just a child and I was bound to show sadness over some thing and eventually cry. Whenever I did cry, however, my father would always scold me to never cry. "Don't cry, you're being such a little girl," he would say. Of course this shut me up because, being only about 5 or 6 years old, I thought "I'm not a girl, I'm a guy, I have to stop crying." Although I was still sad, it was suppressed now, and it would forever start a cycle of suppression that will affect me later.
From then on, anytime I cried, I was scolded, over, and over, and over again. The only thing these scoldings and yellings taught me was that showing emotion is dangerous, never show weakness. It was like obedience training and I eventually didn't cry for a long while, until middle school.
Middle school, I feel like, is terrible for everyone: puberty is starting, new responsibilities are introduced, newer things for everyone to hate and eventually adapt to. When you go your whole life conditioned not to show emotion, you become to develop certain behaviors. I don't want to elaborate on these behaviors as they're all mostly embarassing, but they were all a result of suppression.
It wasn't until the 8th grade, towards the end of my middle school years where I started crying more often. The reasons why I cried were strange, but now that I think about it, I cried mostly because I needed to. Years of suppression just makes it inevitable at some point to cry. Sometimes I cried just because I wanted to, for no reasons but to just let it out for once. Although now I know I could cry at that time, I now had the fear of someone seeing me cry. This fear was the same fear that I had of my father when I cried as a child, and so I cried in secret.
It was ridiculous to think I had to cry in secret out of fear. When you compare that to a gay man coming out for the first time in his life, possibly risking his relationship with his family, the dangers of being seen as inferior, or having people treat you differently, it seems so insignificant, but that how it felt like. I didn't want to risk looking so weak to someone, to feel like a cornered animal about to be attacked. This was a reality for me, and all because I was a boy, where I'm expected to be a certain way.
What if someone couldn't meet those standards? Would they be given help to feel more confident about themselves? Or be ridiculed and regarded as someone inferior?
