Crying at work

I am a crier. I am one of those people that sobs at the sappiest emotional moments in movies and TV. Which I can do in the comfort of my own couch so no big deal.

But what about when I can’t stop myself from crying when I share something emotional in a meeting, or I get upset or angry? This last Saturday I was at an airport in NYC flying back to Toronto and I ended up in an interaction with a white man who was so rude to me in his own righteous anger. I got angry too. When he kept pushing, I said, fuck you, and walked off. I half hoped I’d just be seething and mad, instead I broke into tears. It took me a long time to stop crying.

It made me think of all the times I have cried at work. The first time I can recall was when I pitched an idea I was so excited about to a VP for our team to work on. He got mad, and told me how he got pitched ideas all the time and he couldn’t possibly be paying attention to all of it and maybe I should focus on our existing work. I remember leaving the office to hang out at a mall closeby and went into a store where I started crying. I told the people at the store I had a rough moment at work and just needed to cry and they were so sweet to me.

I have cried quietly in my workstation. I have cried in meetings with my bosses. I have cried in meetings with senior VPs.

Despite wishing that my body wouldn’t betray me by breaking into tears, I also recognize the absurdity of it. Crying is the result of having an emotional reaction. It’s human. It’s involuntary. It’s just a fact of life. And yet we have laced so many meanings into this entirely natural normal reaction of our bodies. We think it means weakness. We think only one gender is entitled to it, and one gender is incapable of it, and oh! that is also about weakness. We think it is an excessive reaction; something that has no room in the workplace. Something “unprofessional”.

The more I delve into the idea of what is “unprofessional” I repeatedly find that it is about setting white men apart from the crowd, the crowd being people of color, queer people, gender-marginalized people, disabled people, you get the picture. Yesterday I learned that even the very of idea of engaging in color was othered systematically, and has a name, chromophobia.

“Unprofessional” sounds me to me like “leave your body outside of work”. “Unprofessional” is a trap, one that wants us to conform to the standards that white men have built up for the workplace over the ages, and one that doesn’t even serve white men because they have bodies too. And one that especially does not serve building an inclusive and diverse workplace, because if we can’t all bring our bodies to work, what does inclusion or belonging even mean?

When I was a manager some folks told me, “You were the first manager I felt safe to cry in front of”. It was both heart warming to hear, and also heart breaking. What will it take for us to build workplaces where crying doesn’t mean anything about a person, just a reaction that we have to make space for and move through? What will it take for us to not shame ourselves for having a normal ass reaction to a possibly very trying circumstance?

I offer you permission, to cry, to be a leader that makes it safe for your people to cry. I offer you permission to be your beautiful messy human self.

Come to my meetup, your tears are welcome

I have been running a monthly meetup for folks that are new to exploring leadership in tech. Whatever leadership means to you, whether you burned out as a tech lead, or you have questions about being an EM, or you want to show up as a leader in your Individual Contributor role, or you’ve been a leader for a long time and want to meet people and support them, or you’ve been laid off and want a supportive community of peers, this is for you!

Honestly, every time I run this meetup, I find myself in a diverse group of people with such a wide range of experiences in tech, the kind of room I often yearned for when I worked in tech, and feel so affirmed and happy to offer this space.

I hope you’ll come, or tell your peers! The next one is on Tuesday April 25, and you can RSVP on Eventbrite. (no longer active - Jan 7 2025)

All the links

Links from the post:

Chromophobia, a book report by Alok Vaid Menon