Only Strangers See Me Cry

As you may or may not know, at the same moment I am writing this, my grandmother is slowly slipping out of life. She had a heart attack on Monday night, and she has been unconscious since then. Her condition has begun to deteriorate. At this point, it is only a matter of time until she is gone completely.

This whole experience of dealing with my grandmother's looming death has brought home to me again just how intensely private I am with my emotions.

I've been crying, sure. I've actually been crying quite a lot. Yet I'm pretty sure that none of my friends have seen me crying. I doubt they've even seen me looking particularly sad. It's not that I'm trying to suck it up and "act normal" around my friends. The reaction is totally involuntary. As soon as I'm alone, I cry. As soon as I'm near other people, the tears evaporate and I feel normal again. It's like I am physically incapable of losing emotional control in front of other people.

I think my friends think that I'm not dealing with all this well emotionally. They only see me looking more or less the same as always: laughing, smiling, teasing. Maybe I am showing signs of how sorrowful I feel, and I just think I'm not. But everyone feels like they have to keep mum about the whole topic of my grandmother. Nobody will mention it unless I bring it up first. And that's a weird thing too. I have this deep-seated inability to tell people about it. It's just easier not to. It seems like I would just be bothering them to tell them about it, and really, there's nothing they can say or do to make things better.

I've always been good at hiding my feelings. Now I'm wondering if maybe it goes deeper than just being a good actress. I actually don't feel my emotions as strongly when I'm with other people, especially people I know. And that's why the only people who have seen me cry so far are the few people I encounter at the end of my walk to school, at the moment when my tears are beginning to dry up and the overwhelming emotions almost completely disappear.