There’s this behaviour that I don’t think is even exclusive to women, but as I get older the male loved ones in my life have less and less patience for it – and honestly, I do too.
It’s this phenomenon where you feel bad – perhaps even very bad – about something that either doesn’t affect you or isn’t under your control. You feel very serious, visible negative emotions of anger or fear or sadness or whatever that don’t make any logical sense. You might cry or tear up or redden or shake. The only way to mitigate it at all is to do that incredibly irritating “complaining about a problem you don’t intend to fix” routine that is the bane of our male counterparts’ lives, and even that doesn’t usually help.
My husband doesn’t understand it. My father doesn’t understand it. My brother doesn’t understand it. My male friends don’t understand it. My male boss and colleagues don’t understand it. Whether they don’t have the language I don’t know, but the best I’ve gotten out of any man no matter how much they care about me is a sullen, “I dunno, stop worrying about it?” I can physically watch them respecting me less every time it happens. I’ve tried stoicism and totally ignoring these emotions, but this almost always leads to more explosive emotions later that embarrass me in front of my spouse. I’ve tried meditating, therapy, journalling, all that good stuff. No matter what, I will see some cute puppy or tiny injustice and stop thinking properly in lieu of “Waaa, I’m so overwhelmed! Waaa!”
How do I stop it? No matter how carefully I prepare for every eventuality, I eventually get emotional for what I logically understand to be an asinine or nonsense reason. I’ve been upset at fictional characters dying, at someone not picking up litter, at a friend being too busy to hang out, at the perceived difficulty of a task at work, at my own birthday, at random stimuli on the street, at my husband being asleep and at the taste of tap water. (These are just examples, try not to zero in on whether specific ones are valid and to what degree.) Almost all the women I know do this to varying degrees of successfully hiding it, but don’t want to talk about it to me – reasonably so, because it’s awkward to think about and rude of me to point out.
It also seems to be linked to my period cycle and thereby hormones. That might be why it’s starting to feel like a genuine point of female inferiority. It’s incredibly, massively embarrassing, even more so if it’s an inherent feature of being female/estrogen-dominated. It’s like I have the mind of a sapient human in the body of a squalling infant or mindless animal.
It makes me honestly hate being a woman, if it’s going to just keep happening when I’m trying to move through the world in a rational manner. How do you deal with this, if it happens to you? How, critically, do you blunt or prevent it? I’m at my wits end trying to keep up with the men I love, to the degree where I’m worried I might be getting sexist. Thank you for any thoughts.