Tears behind my eyes

I am a crier.

There. I said it. Not only am I a crier, I believe that I almost always have tears just behind my eyes. That I could cry at any moment. Sometimes it happens at the most inconvenient times, like last week when I was listening to a particularly moving speech at the Women's Leadership Conference. Or the week before, when I was in a coaching session with a client.

But I rarely cry in front of anyone that I'm close to. I guess it's part of my upbringing- I come from a line of super strong women. And in our family, strong means no tears. Strong means no grief. Strong means no real tragedy of any sort that causes us to take a misstep.

So now I am faced with the fact that I have this huge barrel of tears that have been stored up for a few decades. Which would be OK if I could just let the barrel keep filling up, keeping the lid closed forever.

However, when you match this fact with the fact that I am currently working on expressing my emotions, you start to get into murky water. Or at least, murky for me. I have been making a concerted effort to practice verbalizing my true thoughts and feelings, without worrying about the outcome. I know this may sound basic to many of you, but for me, somewhere along the way I lost my voice.

My voice of vulnerability.

What does this mean? It means I have a very difficult time expressing feelings of love, or anger, or hurt, or sadness. Or perhaps I should clarify- I have trouble expressing these feelings to the person that is inspiring them. I can articulate them perfectly to any third party that will listen.

So I've been practicing. Whenever I have an interaction with someone that is close to me, if I feel at odds afterwards I stop and ask myself why. I ask myself if there is something I would like to say to that person. Or if there is something I would say about the interaction to a third party. Next, I push myself to go back to that person and say what I meant to say before. I'm hoping that eventually I'll get better at expressing these things in the moment.

So what does this have to do with the tears behind my eyes?

I feel like I have a long way to go before I release all the old pent-up tears from past hurts. And digging into current feelings, positive or negative, has caused me to be less adept at keeping that barrel-lid closed.

Does anyone know of a really good tear-proof mascara?