Listen to writer Emily Gould read her personal essay.
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Onscreen, Devi Vishwakumar’s mother was saying good-bye. After four seasons and a lot of personal growth, Devi was finally headed to Princeton, 3,000 miles away from her mom and the television family that my 11-year-old, Raffi, and 8-year-old, Ilya, had cathected onto during our nightly screenings of Never Have I Ever. Raffi cuddled up next to me on the couch, and I buried my nose in his silky hair like I have since he was a baby, which I know he won’t allow me to do for much longer — six months, maybe, or a year if I’m lucky. Devi hugged her mom and thanked her. Nalini, who had remained stern and stoic throughout the series, finally teared up. “Mama, can I hold your hand?” Raffi said, his voice a little quavery. I clutched his hand as the credits ran. I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t totally surprising; by this point, I hadn’t cried for more than three years.
I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.
Before I started trying to figure out how to cry again, I had to get permission from my therapist, L., and my psychiatrist, B. I needed their blessings because I knew that the first step would be to reduce the dosage of at least one of my mood-altering medications. Pristiq, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor that causes some patients to stop crying, seemed like low-hanging fruit.
I didn’t think B. would go for it. She’s bossy and skeptical and more prone to giving advice than any other shrink I’ve ever had, which makes her worth every penny of the $450 she charges per session. I knew she could tell that I was able to show emotion in general; earlier in our session, I’d been performing my usual tight five about my current beef with my husband, eyebrows working their way up toward my hairline. Regardless of my ability to be dramatic, to be irritated, to crack up at a joke, I told her, I felt an eerie blankness where deep sadness should be. She wasn’t immediately opposed to the idea of changing my meds. I’d improved enough, she said, that it would be safe to try a lower dose. But she cautioned me to stay in close touch with her if things went sideways. She didn’t have to remind me what “going sideways” might entail. We had first seen each other three years ago at the nadir of my worst-ever depression, when I could barely move a facial muscle during our Zoom calls.
If I were a man, I might think not crying wasn’t a problem, but also if I had wings and feathers I’d be a bird.
L., my therapist, mostly wanted to know why crying was so important to me — a valid question, as her questions tend to be. I didn’t have a good answer. I told her I craved crying’s cathartic physical release, then clarified that I still had orgasms (just to get that out of the way). Joking around about how much of a therapist she was being, L. asked me to think harder about the significance of crying, to go beyond the moment of triumphant weeping to imagine what it would mean. I realized that I didn’t really know. I’d just understood it as a goal and also something to write about. Unlike every other therapist I’ve ever had, L. doesn’t treat my writing as something separate from the excavations of self that we talk about in therapy but as an inextricable part of my whole deal. It wasn’t that she worried about professionalizing my emotional journey; she was just wondering if I had a thesis beyond “I haven’t cried, and I want to.”
I didn’t have a thesis. Instead, I described sitting at my friend’s funeral, watching as the rabbi sobbed her way through the service, and glancing around to confirm that mine were the only dry eyes in the room. Didn’t she think it was strange that she’d never seen me cry? With my previous therapists, many sessions had ended in tears. But I’d been a different person before I started seeing her and B., before I’d gotten on this exact drug regimen, before the events of 2022 had split my life into a clear “before” and “after.” I wanted the tears back, but I didn’t want the rest of it; I didn’t know whether that was possible, but I wanted to try. When I thought about the project in those terms, I understood why L. and B. were wary. The “before” version of me had done her best to ensure there wouldn’t be an “after.”
There was a part of me that was worried the depression would come back when I went down on the Pristiq, but it didn’t. I felt somewhat dizzy for the first two days and then I didn’t feel different at all. If pressed, I’d say I maybe felt the tiniest bit more tender, as if that hard casing around my feelings were softening up just slightly. Something like my phone coughing up a baby photo could pierce but not penetrate all the way through the casing. With my western-medicine bases covered, I turned to woo-woo shit.
I’ve always had a soft spot for soothsayers and energy healers. Like most writers, I have a yoga teaching certification. I have dabbled in astrology, tarot, acupuncture, cupping, Rolfing, the Alexander Technique, craniosacral massage, hypnotherapy, and herbal medicine. (My children are vaccinated, I hasten to assure you.) I dipped back into familiar territory: yin-yoga classes where I opened my hip-flexor muscles to their fullest because, as every yoga teacher loves to remind you, the hips store a lot of emotions. Then I did a session with my favorite psychic, who encouraged me to ask my ancestors for help when I needed it. They did not oblige. So, weeks later, I took the logical next step: I called a shaman.
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E. had been recommended by a publicist friend, who told me that I should go in with as few preconceptions as possible. E. turned out to be a middle-aged white woman with a compassionate but brusque demeanor. For the first hour of our session, which took place in her airy, well-appointed Tribeca office, I sat on a nubby white couch and she sat in a chair opposite and we did what felt like therapy, except that sometimes when I described a feeling, she’d say something cryptic like, “Oh, that’s Buffalo.” I told her the short version of the story of my life.
Happy suburban childhood, parents who did the best they could emotionally and provided everything material I needed. An early disappointment when I didn’t get into a good college and a subsequent shift in my identity: I wasn’t smart, so I had to be hot. A period of sexual acting out. Discovering drinking and drugs. The revelation of moving to New York and “finding my people.” My first love, whose lack of ambition made my overweening ambition seem pathological and whose love of drinking and drugs made mine seem mild by comparison. Cheating on him, leaving him, writing about it. Writing about my life and getting crucified for it, over and over again, never learning, still not learning. Meeting my husband, starting our family, loving my babies even as they thwarted my ambition, loving my husband even as he thwarted my ambition. The trap of the pandemic and so much rage that had no place to go except inward. How for an incandescent summer it seemed like the odds were finally in my favor, until it turned out that I was in the throes of a protracted manic episode. The hospital, the drugs, the paralyzing depression, the maddeningly incremental process of clawing my way up from the depths to live in the world again. The year Raffi was 6 and Ilya was 3 and I wasn’t really there. How I will never get that time with them back.
“Energetically you’re crying right now,” E. told me. I could feel it in my chest, a stuck lump.
She took out a box that looked like something children would be invited to explore at a nature center, and it was full of twigs, rocks, bark, shells, and bones with a few polished crystals thrown in. She told me to pick whichever ones I wanted, and as I selected each, she said, “Oh, that’s a good one for you,” in a serious tone that made me believe she really meant it. Then I lay down on a long padded bench and closed my eyes. E. arranged the stones I’d chosen on my stomach and chest.
I didn’t know what E. was doing because my eyes were closed, but she seemed to be hovering her hands over my body. When they were close to my face, I could smell the essential oils on her fingers. For the first ten minutes, I felt very much that I was just lying there, which was fine — nice, actually. I let my mind wander. Maybe I would get lunch after this, though I didn’t know the options in the neighborhood very well. I could perhaps reward myself for a job well done by seeing a movie. I had the rest of the afternoon free. Then an invisible hand gripped the muscles of my lower abdomen and began to tug. The sensation rose until it was pressing on my diaphragm, forcing the air up and out of my lungs. I could breathe only very shallowly, every inhalation pressing down as the force pressed up, feeling like a bruise that was moving through my body. When it finished with my lungs, I gasped in a full breath and then it was in my head. My facial muscles clenched into a grimace before releasing. All the while E. was making whoosh-whoosh sounds with her mouth. The force made its way up to the crown of my head, emerged, and was gone. I rested for a few minutes, feeling sore all over. E. gently invited me to open my eyes and sent me home with the same exhortation to drink plenty of water that you’d get from any masseuse.
I didn’t cry that day or the day after. But on the third day, in couples therapy, I almost got there.
My husband and I were having our usual couples-therapy fight, which is about real estate. Specifically: He profoundly, fiercely wants us to buy an apartment, and I don’t want to.
His reasons are logical and rational (the rent will go up; it’s a good investment; we just lived through our landlord selling the building and can’t go through it again). My reasons are emotional and irrational (don’t want to leave the neighborhood we’ve lived in for most of our adult lives and our children’s entire lives). Alternatively: His reasons are emotional and irrational. (Staying in one place and owning it means something to him, a Soviet refugee, that I — happy suburban childhood, all material needs met — can’t understand.) My reasons are logical and rational, too: Our children will be teenagers soon, and we’re going to ask them to switch schools and, perhaps worse, put them in a smaller room and share a bathroom with them?
The solution to the problem so far has been to ignore the problem, except in couples therapy, where we recapitulate these arguments in new and inventive ways. But after my session with the shaman, I was in a more vulnerable headspace. Also a professional rival had published an instant New York Times best seller that week, and it was all anyone could talk about. I brought up the best seller reluctantly, feeling like a cliché as I did. But once I started talking about it, I couldn’t stop. It felt as though I were reading from a teleprompter with no idea what I’d say next.
“When I think about her, I think, like … if I’d had my shit together, if I hadn’t gone crazy, I could have worked harder, I’d have finished my book already. I could have written a best seller and then we wouldn’t be fighting about whether or not to buy a shitty one-bedroom we can’t even afford because I would have made more money. Instead, we’re stuck between two bad options and it’s all my fault. You should have left me when you had the chance. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve anything.”
When I ran out of words, I buried my face in my hands. The tears were almost there. I could feel the pressure of them inside my face, but they refused to come out of my eyes. I dry-sobbed for a minute or two, wailing incoherent things about how much I hated myself.
On the screen, our couples therapist seemed nonplussed, but then she always does. Keith was flabbergasted. He closed the computer and turned to me so that I was forced to meet his gaze. “Are you okay? Did you almost cry?” He had been onboard with the crying project from the beginning, alternating between being intrigued and bemused and concerned about it. In the past, crying had been my biggest weapon, my get out of jail free card — a way to end any fight by forcing him to stop fighting and console me. Now we didn’t have that anymore and we were having to figure it out with words. Being together as long as we have means being 90 percent certain you know everything there is to know about a person and the rest of the time you’re surprised, enraged, fascinated, or enthralled by the unknowable 10 percent of them.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. I told him, honestly, that I hadn’t known it either.
The benefits of crying are medically substantiated: Tearing up releases endorphins and helps the body withstand pain and stress. After I gave birth to my first child, my midwives told me that water would leave my body through urine, sweat, and tears, all of which would carry the pregnancy hormones out with them — a necessary purge. Every evening of the first weeks of Raffi’s life, my parents would leave after dinner, I’d be alone with my husband and my baby, the baby would go to sleep, and the floodgates would open. Keith called 9 to 10 p.m. my “crying hour.” I thought of mothers who had lost their babies and the fact that my living baby could and, in fact, would one day die, and I would weep until I was too exhausted to weep anymore, at which point I would finally sleep. And the midwives were right: Doing that felt as necessary and normal as pissing, as sweating, as breathing. I did it for as long as I needed to do it and then it ended.
Being unable to cry is thought to be quite common, and the causes are well known. Patients who lower their doses of serotonin-altering drugs, like the Pristiq I’m on, sometimes start crying again. Patients who withdraw completely always regain their crying abilities. The other causes — “emotional trauma,” avoidant personality style, depression, and social stigma around showing emotion — are tougher to crack.
In studies, women report crying four times a month on average, while men report crying from once every two months to around once a month (though there is a lot of variation in these statistics, and they typically don’t account for gender beyond a binary). When I asked everyone I encountered when they last cried, women, invariably, told me they cried within recent memory, often that day or that week. Most men couldn’t remember the last time they cried. If I were a man, I might think not crying for three years wasn’t a problem, but also if I had wings and feathers I’d be a bird.
On Reddit, people who haven’t cried for years ask for a song that will heal them, and everyone recommends their go-to tearjerkers. Some people opt for classics that remind them of a dead parent, like “Father and Son,” by Cat Stevens. Redditors debate the artistic merits of the various covers of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and conclude, erroneously, that the best version is by Chris Cornell. On Spotify, playlists called “Songs to Make You Cry” or “Need a Good Cry” tend to skew toward Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens. My go-to weepie, a cover of “Oh Happy Day,” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers — specifically the part where the choir comes in on “He taught me how” — was not doing the trick anymore.
More suggestions from Reddit: Think about animals dying. Watch videos about animals that have died or have been abandoned. Think through the process of learning that a loved one has died. “If none of these work, then maybe you don’t really need to cry?”
Right up until the day I stopped crying, I cried all the time, and markedly more so in the month leading up to that day, probably because of the Lamictal. I’d been on it for almost six weeks; it was the latest in a long line of mood stabilizers I’d been prescribed in the five months following my hospitalization and diagnosis, at age 41, of bipolar one. The list had included Seroquel, lithium, and something I can’t remember that started with a K and that my insurance wouldn’t cover, in addition to the antipsychotic Latuda and the tranquilizers Klonopin and gabapentin. The goal was to find the right cocktail of medications that would keep me in the sweet spot between mania and depression. But doctors tend to err on the side of depression, and on Lamictal, the depression was winning. It was the livable kind of depression, the type whose main symptom is that you get out of bed in the morning and immediately run through a checklist of all the things you must do that day before you’re permitted to go back to sleep. I was doing those things: getting my children ready for school, dropping them off, going to work, picking them up, making them dinner, putting them to bed. That week, I’d done an interview with an author who’d written a new book about suicidality. As I wrote it up, I felt a perverse gratitude that as bad as I’d been feeling, I’d never imagined ending my life.
Chancing a glance in the full-length mirror in my bedroom that day, I noticed that my neck looked red, but it wasn’t until I pulled up my shirt and looked down at my torso that I realized what was happening. After a moment of denial, I called my psychiatrist and told her about the prickly rash spreading over my body. She told me to make an appointment at the nearest dermatologist to confirm that I was having an allergic reaction to Lamictal, which happens in up to 10 percent of patients. Though the rash is usually mild and harmless, there is no way to know whether it will progress into a fatal allergic reaction. When a biopsy of the rash came back positive, my doctor decided it would be safer for me to stop taking the drug cold turkey.
The “before” version of me had done her best to ensure there wouldn’t be an “after.”
The laundry list of meds I’d tried had had their own side effects that ranged from tolerable (dizziness and headaches) to crippling (feeling as though I were walking through Jell-O at all times). Being told that I would have to start over again with some yet-to-be-decided-on drug was news that a person in a different state of mind would have found frustrating. I was not in that state of mind. The situation felt hopeless, as if the thing that was wrong with me were unfixable and I would always be trapped in a cycle of trying various drugs that didn’t work. Or that worked for a while, then stopped. Or sort of worked and might randomly kill me.
Still covered in the rash, I shut myself in the upstairs guest bedroom, where I kept the bottles of all the medications I’d been prescribed by the various doctors I’d seen since getting out of the hospital. Being conscious felt untenable; consciousness was pain. Klonopin and pregabalin made me sleepy, I knew, so I shook a few of each into my palm and lay down and tried to sleep. A few hours later, feeling too awake, I took more. I told my family I was sick and needed to be alone. I was in bed for the next 24 hours.
At some point the next day, I ran out of Klonopin and pregabalin, so I did the logical thing and swallowed most of a bottle of Benadryl. A few hours later, I was reading to my younger child when I started to feel like my heart was trying to batter its way out of my chest.
I took deep breaths and finished the book and kissed Ilya good night and closed the door of the kids’ room. Outside in the hallway, I told my husband what I’d done, and I let him be the one to Google frantically and call poison control. I called my best friend to come watch the kids and then we got in the car and drove to the ER.
The nurses didn’t take me back right away, probably because I was still trying to downplay the whole thing and wasn’t acting like I was having a heart attack. Though I was not thinking clearly and had not been thinking clearly for quite some time, I knew that I didn’t want to go back to the psych ward. So when, after an EKG and bloodwork, a doctor finally came to my curtained-off gurney to talk to me, I told him that I’d taken more Benadryl than I’d intended to. “Why did you take the Benadryl?” he asked. “I wanted to go to sleep,” I said. “Sleep, like, for the night? Or sleep forever?” he said casually. “For the night!” I said. I spent the next three months on medical leave from work, in the maw of a catatonic, pitch-black depression the likes of which I’d never encountered before in my life or even known was possible. I was talking to my therapist friend K. once, and the topic of suicide came up. She told me that her traumatic birth had given her a new compassion for suicidal patients. “In that moment, the pain was so bad that I didn’t care if I lived or died. I just wanted the pain to stop,” she said. No one had ever put it like that before, in a way that made me realize that was how I had felt.
L. and B. were in agreement: In March, I had gone down on my antidepressant as much as they thought was safe. B. reminded me she had other patients at this dosage, and higher dosages, who were perfectly able to cry. We concluded the Pristiq was probably making it harder to cry, but it wasn’t the main culprit. It was time to try something else.
For a while, I’d been on the fence about whether I have capital-T Trauma. Now I felt I should revisit the idea. Months earlier, I’d interviewed an EMDR therapist for a story unrelated to her day job (she writes amazing gay fan fiction), and she’d said something casual like “You should try it!” Her offhand comment opened a door in my mind: I didn’t really know anything about EMDR, except that Meredith Grey had tried it on Grey’s Anatomy and hated it. (Too bad, because Meredith Grey obviously has trauma.)
EMDR stands for “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing” — a therapist guides you through a conversation about your nastiest moments while both sides of the brain are stimulated, either via side-to-side eye movements, tapping both sides of your body with your hands, or listening to audio tones. The psychiatrists I’ve spoken to are ambivalent about whether it “works,” from a neurological standpoint, but they admit that it helps; it seems to me that they feel about it the way some medical doctors feel about acupuncture. As evidenced by my willingness to lie on a table while invisible forces tried to rip my guts out through the top of my head, I’ll try anything once. The day after my couples-therapy almost breakdown, I looked on Zocdoc for EMDR therapists who took my insurance and were located within a mile of my office, then made an appointment with the first one who had availability that Tuesday.
I didn’t know that my initial eight sessions would be intake sessions, during which my EMDR therapist, O., would take a detailed history. I spent the next two months speedrunning everything bad that has ever happened to me, and every bad thing I’ve ever done, over the course of these sessions. After the appointment ended, I got on the subway, went home, and made tacos because Ilya considers tacos mandatory on Tuesday nights. It would have been nicer to curl up in a sensory-deprivation chamber, but taco-making is my lot in life. Stirring the Old El Paso spice packet into browning beef, I thought, No wonder I can’t cry; where would I find the time?
In our sixth session, O. gave me a sheet of paper divided into three columns with all of my shit neatly categorized. The first column, “Theme/Network,” mapped my issues into six categories: “Humiliation/Public Shame,” “Something Is Wrong With Me/Feeling Misunderstood,” “Men/Power/Appeasement,” “Loss of Control/Manic Episode,” “Failure/Not Good Enough,” and, last, the final boss: “Vulnerability/Emotional Control.”
The second and third columns, respectively, were headed “Potential Touchstone Memories” and “Current Triggers/Impact.” When O. and I get around to rehashing the memories associated with that sixth category, we’ll have run the gamut of all my other bad times. Over our next few sessions, we’ll cover “Humiliation/Public Shame.” “Becoming a Meme” and “Relentless Public Criticism After Publishing” are two of the memories I’ll be discussing then, while crossing my arms and tapping my palms against my biceps in an alternating rhythm.
Imagine me sitting in O.’s office, with its old Manhattan professional-building smell and its mustard walls, opposite a slight, attractive woman who’s probably at least ten years my junior. Maybe the tapping will crack me open in some way that bypasses rationality and I’ll feel that same sense of inevitability that I felt in couples therapy when the words spilled out. And O. will coach me through it, uniting the sides of my brain, until “I can’t do anything right” becomes “I make mistakes, but I learn from them” and “I am a bad person” becomes “I am worthy of love.”
When I started this project, I imagined it would end with me crying. It would be a great scene, possibly involving a touching moment with one of my children. Or standing in a museum and being moved to tears by a work of art. Or cradling my aging cat or reconciling with an estranged friend or … etc. While I still think something along those lines will probably take place at some point, I don’t feel like I’m in a rush to get there anymore. I’m beginning to come to terms with the idea that my body — and my brain, which is not separate from my body — is protecting me from something I’m not ready to feel and that the medication I’m on is keeping me safe.
The last time I cried, I was on the precipice of such a deep sadness that I now shy away from anything that comes close to reminding me of that edge, and of course I’m terrified of winding up there again. But the reality of my illness, or condition, or whatever you want to call it, is that I probably will. Even if I stay on the meds, even if I keep seeing three mental-health professionals on a regular basis, something will happen in my life that tips me over into mania followed by depression, the way a high tide is followed by a low tide. It won’t be as bad as last time because I’ll know what’s happening, or at least people around me will. And when enough time passes, I’ll forget how bad it was for long enough to loosen up and let go and feel however I feel. I’ll accept that it will feel very bad, but not forever. “You’ll cry again when you believe that once you start, you’ll be able to stop,” my friend K. predicted. When that happens, I’ll let you know.
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 14, 2026, issue of
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