Enter Label: The Year I Became Wet

Dear Companions,

Had some time alone leading up to my fourth IVF retrieval. My thoughts drifted back to when I first got sick—when I cried all day, every day.

At doctor’s appointments. During therapist Zooms. On the acupuncture table. On the craniosacral table. If they pitied me, I cried. If they didn’t, I cried anyway. For the physical pain. For the situation.

I’d cry in front of family, or alone sending a text. I’d cry as soon as I woke up. I’d cry at the life I was losing, the life I was living, the loss of time as a mother, the isolation, the loneliness, the injustice, the loss of potentiality, the loss of ability, the loss of self-reliance. Just the act of opening or closing a door—made me cry.

It’s hard to describe this kind of ongoing crying—the kind that takes place daily for many months.

It was heavy. It was boundless. It’s different from the fear I have felt during every IVF appointment. I became something wet.

Eventually, I stopped resisting. I began to accept it. I’d cry for shorter periods, sometimes even smiling if someone was watching—just enough to let them know that I knew: this too shall pass.

Anthropologists and trauma psychologists alike have noted that when you’re in deep distress, the pre-verbal brain takes over. Crying becomes your first language again, the body’s most primal expression.

Another name for this: somatic grief. It’s not just your thoughts, but in your tissue, in your nervous system. It shows up in the breath.

The thing about doctors is once they see the crying, it’s game over. They labeled me depressed. They offered pills. And yes, it was despairing. But I never identified as clinically depressed. I was reactively so. Yet everywhere I was dismissed, simply because I could not control my tears.

Even therapists dismissed me—therapists whose entire job is to stay with me. I didn’t know the world could be so unknowing.

The kind of crying I did also aligns with what trauma experts call emotional flooding, when your limbic system is so overwhelmed, it spills out of your mouth in sounds and tears you don’t recognize. In the DSM it might be called Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood.

Peter Levine and others describe it as limbic discharge—a neurobiological unburdening where the body is trying to release held trauma.

There’s research showing that prolonged crying recruits co-regulation. Meaning, it subtly invites others to help. It’s an attachment signal.

In some spiritual traditions, long periods of weeping are seen as a form of purification. A rite of passage.

And then one day, it stopped. I celebrated a week of no crying. Eventually, I forgot to track. Not crying became normal, again.

That moment has a name too: allostatic reset. It means your body, after being stuck in survival mode, is beginning to find its way back through enforced stability of physiological parameters. This reset aims to reduce the body's responsiveness to stimuli.

Now, I can’t quite picture myself like that. While I got misty eyed after my retrieval yesterday, I’m otherwise somewhat empty. Like the stretch between age 21 and 38 when crying felt like something other people did.

But now I understand: We’re all just dormant volcanoes.

We don't cry until we have to. And then we do. And then we stop.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca