Crumbling Is Just a Luxury I Never Had

I cried as a child. Not constantly — I wasn’t technically a crybaby, and I don’t remember crying being the primary response to what was happening. What I remember more than tears is the stomach aches. The trembling.

The episodes of sudden diarrhea that arrived when my father started one of his crazy aggressive episodes, when the apartment shifted into that specific register that meant something was coming and the body registered it before the mind could catch up.

I’ve thought about this for a long time, and the image I keep coming back to isn’t human. It’s a fighting bull entering the arena.

Not my bulls — the ones I have now, the ones I’ve spent years with, whose feces are solid the way healthy bovine feces should be, who are strong and calm in ordinary conditions. I mean the bulls I’ve watched on television over the years, specifically to understand them. Entering the arena from peaceful fields and suddenly finding themselves in a loud, closed, overwhelming space with no context for what’s happening and no choice about being there. What the body does in that moment, before anything has been decided, before fight or flight, before any strategy has formed — it empties itself. Instant diarrhea, the body releasing everything nonessential, preparing for whatever comes next without being asked to.

That was me. That was my childhood body, in the apartment, when the air changed. Not dramatic — just the nervous system doing what nervous systems do when they’ve been calibrated to threat. The stomach contracting. The trembling. The body solving for survival before the mind had finished processing what was happening.

The bulls I have now respond differently. When something frightens them — a sudden sound, an unfamiliar movement, anything that trips the alarm — their eyes change first. The whites show, or something in the quality of the gaze shifts, something that reads as trembling even though it’s just the eye. Then the mouth: a compulsive, rapid licking of the lips that isn’t thirst and isn’t hunger. And then the vocalizations — sounds I can only describe as alarming if you don’t know them, because they’re nothing like the ordinary sounds cattle make. Something deeper and more urgent.

And then I speak softly. And they relax.

I’ve done this hundreds of times, and it still gets to me every time in a way I don’t fully have language for — because I know what it is to have an alarm running in your body with nothing to bring it down, and I know what it is to be that specific age and that specific size and to have no one’s voice available that made the alarm quiet. And here are these massive, powerful animals, animals that could injure me without effort, settling at the sound of my voice, their eyes changing back, the licking stopping, the vocalizations giving way to ordinary sounds.

I became their voice. The one that wasn’t available to me.

By my teenage years, once I was deep enough into martial arts training, the crying stopped. The diarrhea stopped too, mostly. The stomach aches didn’t — they changed, became something subtler, the contraction of something inside when surprise arrived wearing the wrong face — but by then I knew how to stand in the alarm without the alarm running everything. The body had been trained. The gate had been built.

From that point on, crying became rare. Rare enough that the people closest to me — my wife, my mother, who knows me completely and knows exactly why — have said I’m cold. I understand why it reads that way. From outside, the absence of visible grief can only mean one thing. From inside, it means something entirely different.

Here’s what I’ve learned about myself, over a long time and with more evidence than I’d have preferred: crying, for me, is not a relief.

It’s not the release valve it is for most people, the thing that processes what’s accumulated and makes space for the next thing. For me, it’s an opening. A gate. And whatever is on the other side of that gate isn’t grief in a form that processes and resolves — it’s a spiral, and the spiral goes backward, decades back, to places I’ve spent my whole adult life building enough distance from to function.

I’m not describing repression in the clinical sense. I’m not pretending the losses aren’t real or that the feelings aren’t there. The opposite — I think I feel more, not less, than is visible from outside. The cow that arrived too worn out to save. The injured bull I worked on for days and lost anyway. The bottle-fed sheep I’d kept close. Others, across six years of doing this work in rough conditions, in places where things went wrong in the specific ways this project has described. I carry every one of them. I’ve handed every one of them to La Santa Muerte, in the specific way I do that, and I carry them still.

But if I opened the gate — if I gave myself full permission to feel the loss of each one, to mourn completely, to let the grief be as large as it actually is — I don’t think what comes out is tears. I think what comes out is the thing behind the tears, which is everything the tears have been containing since I was a child in an apartment with a bull’s nervous system and no voice available to quiet it. And that thing coming out, at full volume, all at once — I don’t think that’s healing. I know what it leads to. I won’t go back there.

I hold the hole in the wall with my finger.

That’s the image I have for it — a massive wall, and a hole in it, and my exhausted finger pressed against the hole, letting through exactly the drops that get through and no more. A few seconds of something that might be tears, might be the closest available approximation, and then the instinctive stopping before it escalates. Not a decision, not a discipline — instinct. The gate closes on its own now. The wall holds.

I don’t have a position on whether this is healthy. I’ve read enough to know what the clinical literature says, and I understand the argument, and I’m also not interested in performing an emotional availability I don’t have for the sake of conforming to what processing grief is supposed to look like. You can think I’m cold if you want to. Deep down, I know I’m not. The animals know I’m not — they feel it in the voice, and the voice comes from somewhere, and the somewhere is real, whatever it looks like from outside.

Crumbling is a luxury.

This is the most honest thing I can say about it — not a criticism of people who cry, not a claim that my way is better, just an accurate description of what’s true for someone with this specific formation and this specific wall with this specific amount behind it.

Some people can afford to let the wall come down and know it’ll be okay. They have the ground beneath them to survive it. I built the ground. I know what’s under it, and under that, and I know what’s down there doesn’t have a floor.

So I hold the hole with the finger. I let through what gets through. I speak softly to the bulls and watch their eyes change back to ordinary. I hand the ones I’ve lost to her and keep going.

The wall holds.

That’s enough. For now, that’s exactly enough.

The cost of the fence, described from inside, runs through Leave No One Behind — and the specific relationship between grief and continuing runs through everything in The Cockroach Principle and Input Only.