I’m not going into details, but I kept it in during the whole class and then when everyone was gone I started sobbing. I was humiliated. And sadly for me, I’m the kind of person who cries when humiliated and then feels humiliated about crying which creates a circle of pathetic and embarrassed sobbing. But back to the moral of the story; After I left I was horrified that as an intelligent, composed, mature woman I lost my cool and snottily sobbed in front of a professor. I was mortified, and like any good daughter I immediately called my mother so that I could cry and receive sympathy without any embarrassment. She proceeded to tell me about a recent hearing she had to testify in. (My mom is a DSS Social Worker and constantly has to testify in court cases). She said she was grilled by a prosecuting team of no less than six lawyers, she kind of choked under so much pressure and had trouble answering questions which she had spent hours preparing for. When the judge called for a 10 minute break, he leaned over to my mom and told her he was disappointed in her apparent lack of composure. She then went to the bathroom and cried. And you know what I realized? It’s bullshit that a physical display of frustration and humiliation is thought of as unseemly. It’s an entirely natural physiological response to perceived pressure and is exacerbated by the hormonal fluctuations women go through during the course of their menstrual cycle. And it pisses me off to no end that women get the brunt of it, that if you cry at work you will forever be “the girl who cried”. And I speak of this from experience; my roommate once cried at work because she was very frustrated and having a bad day, and for weeks her coworkers said things like, “Oh god, you’re not going to cry are you?”. So last night as I was lying in bed still blushing about my post-class conduct I thought about it and decided; I’m NOT embarrassed. I’m glad that a sobbing girl probably scared the shit out of my unprofessional professor. Crying should not be seen as a weakness, and anyone who says it is is likely a misogynistic prick with no feeling.