Are you… are you crying?” The question was clearly rhetorical. As tears made their way down my baby-faced 21-year-old cheeks in gentle rivulets, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that I was, of course, crying. Either that or I’d just been hit by the world’s worst case of hay fever. In the middle of winter. Indoors.
You never forget the first time your emotions come pouring out of your eyeballs while at work. And it happens to more of us than you’d think – in a recent survey of more than 1,000 US adults by AI resume builder site Resume Now, some 39 per cent of employees admitted to having cried at least once in the workplace.
I’m one of the 14 per cent who fessed up to having wept on “multiple” occasions, but my first time was particularly memorable. The year was 2008 and I was working as a holiday rep in a ski resort after graduating from university – a job that seemed to largely consist of being shouted at by a revolving selection of red-faced, middle-aged, middle-class men called “Martin” and “Henry” for mistakes that had been made by somebody else.
I was a trained apologist, saying sorry a thousand times a day for things completely outside of my control: the plane had been diverted; the coach journey took longer than advertised; the requested ski lessons hadn’t been booked; the hotel rooms weren’t good enough. On and on it went. There’s a reason I’ve never worked a day in customer service since.
On this particular morning, I was being yelled at because I didn’t have some lift passes. I didn’t have them because I hadn’t been given them, and I hadn’t been given them because the inept resort manager had, yet again, messed up the order. I was also functioning on approximately three hours’ sleep, having worked a 24-hour shift the day before.
As I falteringly tried and failed to explain the error, the man in front of me brayed at me to “take some responsibility for your utter incompetence!” I could feel my face getting hot. My throat tightened; my voice caught and gave the uncontrollable wobble that indicates a damp face is imminent. It was excruciating but unavoidable – tears were coming and there was literally nothing I could do to stop them.
Rarely had I felt more embarrassed in my young life – and yet something miraculous happened. The angry man stopped yelling. He suddenly looked flustered. He actually seemed, could it possibly be… ashamed?
“Ahem, I mean, there’s no need to get upset,” he mumbled gruffly while avoiding eye contact. “It’s a bit annoying, that’s all. Just get us the passes when you can, and it’ll be fine.” I nodded mutely, not trusting myself to speak. A beat passed, then: “I’m sorry for shouting. I know it’s not your fault.”
Thus it was that I learned early on that crying at work, though humiliating, isn’t always such a bad thing. I’ve never once “faked” it or sobbed on purpose to get my way . Despite my drama degree, I never cracked how to crack on demand – but the several instances of emotional incontinence I’ve succumbed to over the years while on the clock have never been the career-ending mistakes I thought they’d be. On the contrary: if anything, as in the case of the furious ski man, they have often been curiously helpful.
There was the time I cried in anger as a young, clueless editor, because the head salesman had lied to me and promised the magazine cover interview to his client in exchange for a lucrative advertising deal.
There was the time I broke down in front of my boss because I’d just had another project tossed on top of an already unwieldy workload and legitimately thought my brain might explode. And there was the time a source tore into me over the phone for publishing a story they’d previously been very happy to speak about, prompting me to scuttle off to the toilets and secretly bawl my eyes out.
The several instances of emotional incontinence I’ve succumbed to over the years have never been the career-ending mistakes I thought they’d be
In each of these cases, I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Though I was mortified, the salesman apologised, my boss immediately redistributed some of the tasks on my endless to-do list and sat down with me to decide what would feel manageable. Even the hiding-in-the-toilets cry resulted in me bonding deeply with a female colleague I hadn’t previously known well; she came in, found me wailing and offered hugs and emotional support. We’re still close friends to this day.
No one wants an employee who falls to pieces at the drop of a hat, of course – there is a certain level of discomfort and stress we must sometimes endure at work with grit and resilience. But when things get past a certain point – when we’ve been pushed to the brink, insulted, overloaded or tipped into burnout – tears can often accomplish what stiff-upper-lip stoicism cannot. They’re a physical line in the sand, a boundary crossed; they force an issue to be confronted and dealt with, instead of being left to seethe below the surface.
Tears can make someone realise they’ve gone too far, or that something needs to change, or that, quite simply, the person shedding them is an honest-to-God human being with real feelings. There is little that’s more powerful, especially in the frequently cut-and-thrust ecosystem of the modern workplace.
Showing vulnerability isn’t weakness. It’s our greatest strength, whatever the Andrew Tates of this world would have us believe. No shade on Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons or The Cure, but big girls and boys do cry, as it turns out – and it could just be the best secret weapon in our arsenal.
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