Learning to Cry Again: How a Virus, Flooding, & a 9/11 Photo Helped Me Truly Feel Again
Plus a new episode of the SoulTech with Cynthia Podcast featuring Informed.Now's Kira Shishkin.
Cynthia L Elliott
3x Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, & Cultural Futurist
I need to tell you about the week I finally learned how to cry again.
It started small, the way these things always do. My car’s air conditioning began acting up after “repairs”, which if you know Florida in July, you know is basically a personal attack from the universe. Then I caught whatever salad-adjacent virus is currently making its rounds and became violently ill. Then, in the middle of all that, I came across an old photo of myself while digging through my archives. I was wearing the exact outfit I had on the morning of September 11, 2001. The photo was taken right before.
And then, as if the universe wanted to make absolutely sure I couldn’t outrun any of it, my first floor toilet flooded. Not a little. Inches of water across the entire first floor. I was throwing up and cleaning sewage water at the same time. The next morning, it happened again. (A word to the wise, beautiful souls: be very, very careful with wipes.)
By the time that toilet flooded the first time, something in me that had been holding the line for twenty-five years simply gave out.
What Actually Happened on 9/11
I don’t share this part often, but it matters here. I was a publicist for the World Trade Center at the time of 9/11, and I was supposed to be in the restaurant for a meeting at the exact moment the tragedy began. In the days leading up, my spirit guides repeatedly pushed me to cancel that meeting. Which I did.
That fateful morning, before the second plane ever hit, I was shown visions of both towers coming down. I tried to call people. I tried to get help. I ran through the streets crying, begging anyone to listen to me. My coworkers, who understood the WTC was one of the big clients I had landed that year, thought I was losing my mind.
What I had seen came true.
I have never fully known what to do with that morning. The knowing, the running, the pleading with people who looked at me like I’d cracked. After I was done helping injured people, I walked nearly 100 blocks back to my apartment in that ghost town and cried for days. I remember taking that beautiful suit (I had bought it to celebrate my glam PR job) to the trash. It was destroyed and no longer wearable.
After that day, something in me closed. I had counted on one hand how many times I’d cried by the time I turned thirty. I was heavily masked long before I had language for what that meant. But after 9/11, I lost access to almost everything except anger. I could be terrifying when provoked. Underneath that anger was an ocean I had sealed off, because I had learned, in the worst way possible, that feeling too much and being believed too little could break a person.
So I didn’t feel. I performed. I powered through. For over two decades, chaos was where I was most comfortable, because chaos didn’t ask me to feel anything. It just asked me to handle it. And I always could.
Until the toilet flooded and I couldn’t.
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The Breakdown That Was Actually a Breakthrough
I want to be honest with you about what that moment looked like, because I think too many of us have been taught to sanitize our breakdowns before we’re allowed to talk about them.
It was not graceful. I was sick, surrounded by water that should not have been in my house, and I ugly cried. From the heart. In the most real way I have cried in twenty-five years. Not performative tears, not the polite kind you dab at the corner of your eye. The kind that comes up from somewhere old and finally finds a door.
I was left spinning for hours after that. Sick, disoriented, cracked open. And once I could hold liquids down again, something shifted. I started to feel. Grief, fear, tenderness, things I hadn’t had real access to since I was a young woman running through downtown Manhattan trying to get someone, anyone, to believe what I already knew.
I think what happened to me is far more common than we admit. So many of us are walking around heavily masked, mistaking our numbness for strength, mistaking our ability to power through anything for healing, when really it’s just very sophisticated avoidance. We wear our competence like armor. And most people will never know the ocean sealed up underneath it, because we’ve gotten so good at performing that we’ve almost convinced ourselves too.
Learning to Cry Without Shame
If any part of my story is landing in your body right now, here is what I’m learning, and what I want to offer you.
Stop treating tears as a malfunction. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that crying meant weakness, or worse, that it meant losing control in front of people who couldn’t be trusted with our real selves. Your tears are not a system failure. They are your nervous system finally trusting the room enough to let go.
You do not need a socially acceptable reason. You do not need your life to be falling apart in a way others can see and approve of. Sometimes the trigger is a photograph. Sometimes it’s a flooded bathroom floor. The size of the trigger has nothing to do with the size of what’s finally being released.
Let your body lead. I was sick before I cried. That is not a coincidence. Sometimes the body has to get loud enough, uncomfortable enough, that the mind finally stops managing everything and steps aside. If you’ve been trying to think your way into feeling, try letting your body get there first.
Release the guilt about the years you didn’t feel. I spent a long time being almost angry at myself for how numb I’d been, as if I had chosen it. I didn’t choose it. It chose me, on a morning when I ran through the streets telling the truth and no one believed me. Numbness was not my failure. It was my survival. And now, feeling again is not a betrayal of the woman who survived. It’s her reward.
Do not cry alone if you don’t have to. This one matters more than almost anything else I’m going to say.
The Women Who Held Me
While I was spinning, sick and cracked open in my own home, something beautiful happened. A dozen women from our Her Health Summit community began messaging me. Not all at once and then gone, but in rotation, day after day, taking turns showing up with love and care. Checking in. Sitting with me in it, even from a distance. Reminding me I did not have to hold this alone.
I have built a career and now a Foundation around the idea that we heal in community, but I will tell you, beautiful souls, there is nothing like living proof of your own philosophy showing up in your inbox at 2am when you need it most.
We talk a great deal in this culture about individual healing. Therapy, journaling, breathwork, all of it beautiful and all of it necessary. But there is a piece we do not talk about enough, which is that healing was never meant to be a solo sport. We were never meant to sit alone in our flooded bathrooms, sick and cracking open, with no one to witness it. We heal in relationship. We heal in circles. We heal when other women say, without being asked twice, I see you, I’m here, take your time.
That is the real medicine. Not the toilet, obviously. The witnessing.
An Invitation
A new episode of SoulTech with Cynthia just dropped! My special guest is media’s newest darling - Informed.Now’s Kira Shishkin. We talk modern media, information manipulation and so much more. Listen on Apple, Spotify & YouTube.
If this story stirred something in you, if you recognized yourself in the masking, the anger where softness should be, the decades of powering through, I want you to know you are not broken and you are not alone. You are simply carrying an ocean that has been waiting a long time for permission.
This is exactly the kind of real, unfiltered, woman-to-woman truth telling we are building at the Her Health Summit this October 28th in Boca Raton. Not slick panels reciting wellness buzzwords, but real women (along with some amazing male allies) sharing real experiences, the kind that remind you that your story, however messy, however long it took to surface, has a place in the room. If you’ve been craving a community that will rotate in to hold you the way mine did, I would love for you to join us.
Until then, beautiful souls, let yourselves cry. It’s not falling apart. It’s finally arriving.I deeply respect pastors, priests, ministers, and spiritual teachers who help
With truth and forward momentum,
Regards,
Cynthia
3x Best-Selling author, Cynthia L. Elliott, is the founder of the SoulTech AI Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting underserved communities in the age of artificial intelligence, and the author of SoulTech: 12 Codes for Awakening Your Higher Self.
