Today my unconscious dropped a little saying into my mind:
If you can't cry for yourself, you can't cry for anybody else.
I've spent my spare time for the rest of the day trying to figure out what it means. Here's my best guess (so far) at what it's about:
There are those couple of years of my childhood of which I can't remember all that much except that I was utterly miserable. (I don't know if I was miserable before then, since I remember even less of my early childhood and no feelings from then at all.) I remember trying to survive that time by mentally hitting myself and telling myself that, since nobody else cared about my misery, I should stop being stupid and stop caring about it, too. That whatever happened to me, it wasn't something to cry about.
I think I succeeded.
But -- I think that in order to be able to cry, you have to have the feeling that someone, somewhere, actually cares that you're crying, even if it's only you that cares.
I'm sure there's more, but this is as far as I've gotten.
I care, Asche. You are not alone.