Living in Washington, D.C., is my choice, and, some might say, my mistake. But I’m a city girl by blood, and I’ve found the district wonderfully charming and homey, provided you avoid certain areas and employ the buddy system often. The White House is less than two miles from my home. Some of America’s best museums are right down the street. Post-Covid, the D.C. restaurant scene is even making a comeback.

District residents are finding new ways to utilize our great public spaces: cry zones. When Kiara McGowan had her “worst summer ever” last year, first losing her job, then becoming homeless for a time, she started a now-popular TikTok account called “@cryingindc,” on which she ranks the best public places to cry in Washington, D.C. Metro trains are top on the list, as is any spot near a body of water, she told local news. McGowan now arranges events for people to gather and cry. In November at a library, she hosted a “Cry n’ Vibe” to “build a community of criers” and gave out tissue packets that read, “Crying is a vibe.”

What might compel adults to seek out public cry zones? It’s nice to feel like you’re not alone when you get a compulsive urge to cry, some at the “Cry n’ Vibe” told the Washington Post. I’m reminded, reading about “cry zones,” of Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times article from a while back: “We Should All Know Less About Each Other.” To each their own. If someone needs a cathartic cry on the Metro, fine. The most important message of McGowan’s social media experiment doesn’t seem to be that people need public cry spaces but that people are in desperate need of community, emotional support, and honest friendship.

And, social media’s dramatization of normal events, such as crying, doesn’t help the mental health crisis among young adults. I’ve a treasure trove of embarrassing anecdotes about my time using social media, one being the social gratification I began to crave while sharing my emotions on Snapchat. When I was angry, sad, or self-conscious, I could post about it — and in would come a flurry of expected messages. Friends asking “What’s wrong?” Crushes reacting with emojis. The act of feeling became an event. Dealing with my emotions wasn’t as important as the reaction I’d get from posting about them. Unless I, as a teen, was the only social media user to over-publicize my emotions, I’m sure others had the same problem: using platforms to cope with emotions, not to feel them. Public cry spaces seem in danger of eliciting the same effect.

Crying in public is having a moment: see some recent articles about the “power of crying in public,” how to cry in public, “why crying at work is essential for your mental health,” “the case for crying in public,” and the “best place to cry in public” in San Francisco. While my grandparents would certainly balk at the idea of discussing “cultural stigma” around crying in public, the discourse isn’t all that surprising considering that young people’s emotions have been fried, and sent into frenzies, by social media.