The Places I've Cried in Public

by Holly Bourne

Girls cry on park benches. Girls cry in train station waiting-rooms. They cry on the dance floor of clubs. Girls cry at the bus stop. Girls cry at the back of lessons. They sit on the pavement and cry on cold concrete at two a.m., their shoes held in their hands. Girls cry in school bathrooms. Girls cry on bridges. They cry on the stairs of house parties.

We leave behind echoes of our lives everywhere we go, trapping them into the fabric of the world around us.

You never know if happy memories are going to become sad ones. They glow and shine in the vast realms of our subconscious, making that part of our brain feel like it’s filled with glitter.

They’re crying because their guts, or their instinct, or their psychic sense, or whatever the hell you want to call it, but the thing that’s evolved to keep them safe is screaming ABORT, ABORT and yet they’re too scared to listen to it.

Crying is a very obvious sign that something isn’t going right in your life. You should not ignore tears.

Kindness isn’t a reward for good behaviour, Amelie. It should be a given.”

Sometimes that’s all you can do in life, when it comes to pain – try and understand it.

We all carry scars and scorch marks around with us. We cuddle up each night with ghosts of damaging memories – we let them swirl around our heads, never able to settle or heal because we can’t make sense of this terrible thing that happened to us, and why we’re finding it so impossible to get over. You can’t force pain to leave until it’s ready to. Like the most annoying party guest, it only leaves in its own sweet goddamned time. Meanwhile there’s nothing you can do but carry it until it’s ready to be released. But understanding the pain – why it’s there, why it’s not leaving – it makes that burden much easier to bear.

“Sometimes,” she says, “when someone doesn’t treat us well and attacks the essence of who we are, that causes a trauma. It’s natural to want to be loved – it’s the most natural thing in the world. So, when we love someone and they hurt us, our brain doesn’t like it. Our brain doesn’t like trauma, it doesn’t like feeling unsafe, and sometimes it comes up with unhealthy shortcuts in order to trick us into feeling safe.”

“One of the things the brain does to feel safe, is it creates an intense bond with the person who hurts us. It’s the ego’s way of protecting itself.

was brave enough to leave just a sliver of myself that can regenerate and regrow. So many girls don’t. Always, always be the girl who does.