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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners,
old listeners wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course dive into the psychology
of our 20s.
Today let's cut to the chase we're going to be talking about crying.
It might seem a little bit insignificant to be devoting a whole episode to this.
It might seem a bit strange when it comes to our 20s.
I think that a lot of us try to avoid crying but sometimes there is no better feeling than
just having a solid moment to let yourself be in pain, to experience a little bit of
self pity and to let it all out through tears.
And sometimes nothing feels more frustrating than wanting so badly to cry and have that
physical outlet for your emotions and being unable to.
It can feel like something within us is blocked, something about us is defective or faulty
because we're not feeling things deeply enough or to the point where we can let it all
out and have this physical expression of what is occurring internally.
And I really get that.
It can leave us with a lot of frustration and almost anger at ourselves and just as longing
for a good old fashioned sub.
The truth of the matter is our 20s are really freaking hard.
Being human is hard, life is hard, we are all going to go through difficult moments
and times in our lives where we lose people, we are frustrated by life.
We're having a really rough time at work, our boss isn't also and being able to release
all that stress, that grief, that anger, that sadness is one of the good parts about
being human and having that huge catalog of emotional expressions and ability to feel
emotions.
When we feel detached from that ability that and that happens every now and again, we
I think feel almost under control, under the control of our emotions.
And we feel like there is this pent up energy inside of us that has nowhere to go but up
and into our brain and cause us more stress and more fear and more anxiety.
And tears serve a purpose, sometimes they serve as an outlet there is nothing better.
So for anyone who is feeling a little bit emotionally repressed at the moment who is
finding that they can't even cry in the moments they want nothing more than, that's
what we're going to discuss today.
We're going to examine some of the reasons psychology and science tells us we need to
cry, why we can't cry from emotional suppression to medications or shock and how we can get
back in touch with our big emotions rather than being scared of them.
So let us get into it.
To start off with, why do we actually need to cry?
Obviously if we can do it, evolution tells us that it must have served a purpose.
Before we talk about that, let's just briefly mention some of the anatomy for a second.
Each of us is born with two tear ducts in each of our eyes and they have two openings,
one on the upper eyelid, one on the inner eyelid.
You know what I'm talking about, close to the bridge of the nose.
Now crying doesn't just occur for emotional reasons.
There are actually three different types of tears.
We have basal tears, reflex tears and emotional tears.
Basal tears, they wash away dirt and germs and yucky things, keeping us from getting an
infection going blind, that kind of thing.
Reflexed tears are what occur when something harmful gets an eye like a bug or when we're
cutting onion, it's responsive to something coming from the environment.
And then finally we have emotional tears.
Mental tears are a lot more complicated than basal and reflexed tears, which I'm sure
we kind of all assumed at this point.
But the thing about emotional tears is that they are not automatic.
In order to cry our limbic system, the part of our brain that regulates our emotions,
that part of our brain has to be activated and send signals to our glands to produce tears.
And in those tears contains a bunch of other proteins and hormones that we don't find
in our everyday basal or reflexed tears.
Things like potassium prolactin, which also helps us produce milk.
And finally the big one, stress hormones like cortisol.
This is probably our first clue that we're dealing with something a little bit bigger
when we need to cry.
It's a lot more psychological than just physical.
It's because most evolutionary researchers will tell you that crying serves a purpose.
Actually, it serves a number of important functions that all have something to do with
how we feel emotion and how we connect to others through mental, physical and emotional
expressions of pain.
So firstly, when you are an emotional or physical pain, crying can actually make you feel really
good, it can actually provide real physical relief from that pain.
When you cry, your body releases hormones such as endorphins and oxytocin, the same chemical
structures that we see in pain relievers and opioids.
That is why a big sub feels just so good.
Even though that might seem counterintuitive because we often associate it with sadness and
pain, really this act is telling your body that something is wrong, something has triggered
this reaction and it needs to do something about it.
So it fires up all these pleasurable neurotransmitters and hormones to counteract whatever painful
things bothering us.
There is a really interesting article by Harvard Health that talks about this and it also speaks
on how crying provides an emotional catharsis.
It gives bigger emotions somewhere to go that isn't just running around in our brain in
an endless, ruminating loop.
So it's really interesting because that is not a new idea, right?
Even back in a lot of the ancient civilizations, Greeks, the Romans, they almost saw tears
as having a healing capacity.
They were they were draining us of something negative.
They would purify us and not only has that really continued to stand, but now there have
been a lot more papers and a lot more research into this than is proving that those initial
conceptions and ideas were actually pretty close to the scientific truth.
Now crying isn't the only way to do this.
Exercise is another way.
Displacement, as Freud will call it, is also another way taking your pain out on others.
But it is the one that seems most accepted and socialized.
Of course, if your pet died, you're going to cry.
People accept that as part of the sadness.
If someone yells at you, you have this really big emotional blow up or a conflict.
Again, it seems like the most natural reaction to a painful or uncomfortable situation.
Crying in this way can also have a self-suiting effect.
So this was a finding published by a 2014 study that noticed when people cry, this very
act also activated their parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us relax.
And once again, we get that intense distress kind of out of the way through the act of
crying.
When we activate our parasympathetic nervous system, a whole bunch of other things occur
in our body.
Our heart rate begins to slow down, we begin to feel quite tired.
And also all that emotion seems, and that fear really seems to clear.
So we're able to think more rationally and from a place of, I don't want to say peace,
but from a place of calm.
It's also why after crying, you might feel really exhausted or drowsy, maybe even peaceful.
You have involuntarily activated this very important part of your nervous system, but also you
have drained a lot of that energy that was keeping you tense and sad and stressed.
Now there's been a bit of preliminary research that has suggested that crying, the reason
why it makes us feel this way is because the very act of crying releases stress hormones
through the production of tears, meaning that there is less of that stress hormone, particularly
cortisol, to go around in the body.
I'm getting like, just, you know, I wanted to mention that, but I would also say that
probably needs to be a bit more research.
I don't really see how a few millimeters of tears can have that much impact on the
stress response of a 60 kilo or 100 kilo, 150 kilo human.
Like it seems quite negligible, but that is another explanation.
And the final one as to why we cry.
Has a lot to do with our social evolution.
So one of the first things that babies do when they are born is cry.
Obviously, that's to get a lot of the fluid out of their lungs, but it's also to get
attention.
And then they pretty much don't stop crying ever, like even as humans, we don't stop crying,
but especially when we're babies, like, babies cry a whole lot.
And the reason why is because crying is what we would call an attachment behavior.
It serves as a signal to those around us to comfort us.
It draws people's attention to us because when they hear those cries, that automatically
causes this association with distress.
And that acknowledgement of distress activates the part of our brain that deals with empathy.
And that is what motivates us to help someone to be pro-social.
So crying in children and in adults promotes closeness.
It promotes empathy in others.
It promotes kindness because it is intended evolutionarily, biologically, to elicit care
and comfort.
Actually attachment theory, very, you know, the first attachment theory paper talks about
the role of crying quite a bit.
So back in the original studies conducted by John Bolby and Mary Ainsworth, they noticed
that children who showed a lack of crying when their parents left, when they were being
comforted by a stranger or were left in a strange situation.
Those children whose immediate reaction was to not cry but to stay silent, they probably
had a disorganized attachment style or an insecure, anxious, avoidant attachment style.
Because they were used to this very innate and instinctual act of crying, not being met
with the typical response, you know, support, care and love.
And so they almost just stopped doing it because they realized that it didn't serve a function,
the function that it should be serving, which is to, you know, receive empathy and receive
care and kindness not just from your primary caregiver but from other people within our
species around you.
Alright, so now that we've spoken about the functions and purposes of crying, what are
some of the reasons that we can't do it?
Why can't we cry?
That's the real title of this episode.
So let's start off with the first reason.
Maybe you're just really happy.
There is no reason at all why you can't cry.
It's just that you have no reason to.
That is actually a completely valid explanation for this.
We're kind of all on this like very fun rollercoaster of life and sometimes you're just
at a high point and you've stayed there for a few months.
That is a good thing.
I promise, but I get that sensation and anticipation of waiting for the other shooter drop.
I think if you're used to feeling like you're just someone who has bad luck or never feeling
quite satisfied or happy and you're in this moment where everything just seems to be
strangely going your way, it's natural to be feeling a little bit anxious about that
and wondering what's wrong with you, wondering when this is all going to disappear.
I want to give you permission right now.
It's okay to just be happy and content for a while.
But if you're not crying when it feels necessary like after a traumatic event or something really
hard happening in your personal life, that is probably a sign that your stoicism is
going a bit too far and you may be partially disconnected from your true emotions and what's
going on underneath the seemingly composed surface.
If it feels like an appropriate time to be crying and you can't, the number one explanation
is shock.
After a loss or even something like a breakup, I hear so many people saying it's so strange,
like it's been a few days and I'm completely fine, like I haven't cried once, it's been
like three weeks and I'm totally already over it.
That is just not probably true, that's not a sign that you just have super quick emotional
healing powers or that you've already recovered.
What you're actually experiencing is probably shock.
So we know that there are a few stages of grief that we go through after something, after
a loss after something happens.
Shock or denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
And the depression stage is what I think most of us think when we think about heartbreak
or loss.
It's very outward, it's very feeling, it's very visible and emotional, it's probably
even teary.
But before we get there, we have three other stages to pass through that don't always involve
as many tears.
Shock is the most significant one.
It is a protective or defensive mechanism, our brain and lists in the immediate aftermath
of something intense or life changing or painful that helps us compartmentalize emotions
until we are prepared or have the mental resources or the mental space to deal with them.
So there's an evolutionary reason for this.
Back in the day when we roamed the Sahara, we were fleeing wild beasts and lions and
warring with our neighbors, we sometimes had to delay an emotional reaction until we were
out of danger.
Because heavy emotions during that time could really cost us our lives, it would take our
attention, offer for escaping, offer for getting away from a dangerous situation.
And this instinct to avoid initially hard heavy emotions for survival purposes has carried
with us.
And so now it's seen in response to different more modern triggers, like a breakup.
Our brain is trying to keep you safe for as long as it can by keeping those emotions and
feelings almost like behind a mental wall of glass.
We can see what happened.
We can see that it's going to hurt, but the full impact hasn't hit us yet.
It may also be that you know how, you know, you know how hard it's going to be when you
finally let yourself feel what you've been through.
So you are trying your hardest, unconsciously, even consciously to delay the inevitable.
Even if this isn't entirely conscious, what you're doing is buying into the delusion
that putting off hard feelings may mean that they never actually occur.
So when the wall comes down and you may not want to hear this, but it will eventually
come down.
It could be days, it could be weeks, it could be months, even years.
That's when we see the suffering we're most accustomed to seeing begin.
The interesting thing is that more often than not, the thing that finally triggers out
here is normally completely unrelated to the initial or predicted source of our sadness
and our misery.
We can spend like months in a state of just like complete emotional stagnation and numbness.
And then one Monday, a random Monday, you miss your bus, your outfit is uncomfortable.
It's just a little bit too hot and then you stab your toe and the tap just gets turned
on.
And all of those months of pent up emotion flood into your life.
All it took was for that metaphorical straw to break the camel's back, that daily stress
of that small thing on top of all of the other major life events to finally provide a release.
It feels a little bit unfair, I know, but sometimes the brain and our mind and our psychology
doesn't operate according to our rules and what we want.
In the meantime, you may not be able to tap into that side of you that really does just
want to have a big cry in response to whatever it is.
Another reason why you might be struggling with this reaction is because of medication,
specifically anti-depressants and SSRI.
So selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
They've done studies on this.
It's one of the biggest side effects of being on anti-depressants, 46% of people who are
on these experienced, blunted emotions.
And although these medications are amazing, they help relieve symptoms of depression, anxiety
that have, you know, maybe caused complete dysfunction.
They can also affect how we experience everyday feelings.
So I've talked about this before on the show.
I was on Lexipro for three years.
I don't think I cried more than twice over that period of time.
And during that time, I went through a serious, like, long-term breakup, my grandfather passed
away.
A lot of other things were happening in my personal life.
And I just couldn't, literally, no matter how hard I tried, I could not shed a tear.
And it was really strange because I had all the other signs that I wanted to.
I had this tightness in my chest.
I had this swelling in my throat.
I had this tension in my forehead.
It felt like it was going to happen.
I was almost there.
And then it would stop right short of like a tear.
And it was so unfulfilling and in more serious moments, it actually did feel like the emotions
lingered longer in my body because they hadn't nowhere to go.
And that at times made them harder to manage.
It made it, it kind of made it seem like they never truly went away.
But they were kind of just always there at a lower frequency in the background.
The way that I was talking to my therapist about it was when you have a fly buzzing around
your house and you just can't quite catch it.
And it's not that annoying, but it's still pretty annoying and you just want to get rid
of it.
You just want to smash that fly.
You just want to have that catholic action.
I know this is a common experience for a lot of other people I've spoken to who are
on these medications.
And it's kind of like you're forced into this trade-off.
Do you want to be able to function and not be overwhelmed by anxiety or depressive thoughts?
That's going to mean that sometimes you have to give up your ability to feel as deeply
and as intensely as you previously have.
And it's a decision that we need to make individually.
It doesn't mean that it's not still difficult and there aren't times when you really wish
that you had access to all that emotion, your full range of sensitivity and feeling,
and just that energy source that you can tap into.
Speaking of medications for depression, we should also probably focus on the impact of
those conditions as well on our ability to cry.
So I think one of the common misconceptions about being depressed is that you are constantly
sobbing.
You're constantly at pool of tears.
Actually sometimes you are so sad and for lawn, you just can't cry.
This is known as depression with melancholia.
You are completely and entirely numb to all your emotions.
And in that flat emotional estate, it's not that you just can't even feel the good things.
You can't feel anything.
Sadness included because nothing, not even the bad things, the hard things, the painful
things have meaning to you anymore.
Now I would say this is super rare but it does still occur and it's worth going further
with your investigation into this if you think it applies.
This is obviously a significant change in how we experience emotions and therefore you
will need to talk to a therapist because they're going to be able to really tell you
a lot more about what creates this situation and kind of how to get out of this complete
mental numbness and stowness.
Now, let's move on and talk about the reason most people think of when it comes to an inability
to cry, I saved it for last, emotional repression, the unconscious act of pushing down feelings
that we see as dangerous or too much.
People deal with emotions in different ways.
We can respect that.
Sadness, grief, anger, whatever it may be, heartbreak, they are not a one size that fits
all experience.
Some people have a very expressive style.
They cry very easily and frequently.
Often these people are more sensitive, they have more empathy, they've been socialised
to be more accepting of tears and crying as a way to manage emotions.
It may also come down to factors like they sleep less, they have underlying depressive
symptoms like we spoke about.
All of these just make us more prone to crying, sometimes for no reason.
Other people though are more repressed and they find it really hard to cry and to express
what's going on through this method.
And then there's this category of people who may intentionally suppress their emotions
to avoid revealing to themselves, not just to others, what they're feeling.
Frequently with repressed emotions, you might not even realise you're unconsciously avoiding
your feelings, which is why you might be confused by your inability to cry.
That is because the origins of this inability happened a long time ago, often in the past,
in our childhood experiences.
It could be the case that big displays of sadness, even happiness, were not accepted
in your family or culture, they weren't seen as appropriate.
And so when you have the urge, you have been conditioned time and time again to suppress
rather than feel.
It may have been that every time you did cry, you were expressing sensitivity towards
your emotions, you were punished for it.
And so you have begun to associate the need to feel with punishment and pain and shame.
We see this a lot with men.
Society continuously tells them it's not manly or appropriate or how boys should behave.
And so they internalise those external attitudes, such that they're threshold for whatever
demands tears, it's much higher.
And even when they really, when things get really hard, they cannot get themselves into
this state because they are so used to suppressing this urge.
And it carries a lot of shame that also creates a disconnect between us and our emotions.
I was lucky I had a father who probably cries more than my mother, but a lot of people
do learn how to process their emotions from the parent who is the same gender as them.
I was really lucky.
I feel like I grew up in a family who that was always accepted.
There was a natural reaction to tears and I sometimes feel quite sad for people who
didn't have this as an example who weren't socialised and raised in an environment of
emotional acceptance.
As I said before, we have the ability to cry for a reason to provide release, catharsis,
as a social cue to notice when people are upset when they need our help.
When you are forced to deprive yourself of some emotional function like crying, other
things also tend to go off balance.
As suggestions that all that feeling goes elsewhere and it is expressed in more harmful
ways like through rage and anger because it needs somewhere to go.
And I think that is a lesson to all of us that suppression and avoidance of emotions,
it doesn't mean that they don't exist, that they cease to exist.
They will find a way to come to the surface.
They will find a way to get your attention whether you want them to or not.
So we have discussed the main reasons for our inability to cry.
But what do we actually do about it?
We are not going to leave it there.
What is the way forward here?
Is it to watch as many sad movies as possible or animal rescue videos and wait until something
clicks?
Probably not.
When we are getting to the root of this, we actually need to take a step back from the
tears and look what is underneath it or a disconnect with your deeper emotional state.
So we are going to talk about all of that and more after this short break.
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When it comes to an inability to cry the solution is not forcing yourself to cry by any means
necessary it's not like you have a blocked drain or a pipe and once you remove the gunk
everything will start flowing freely again you know you're not a plumbing problem the
solution is getting back in touch with what you're feeling when you're feeling it it's
about a deeper emotional disconnect that we need to heal so let's talk about it.
If you've been through a few hard chapters recently or you have been once as we said
you know conditioned or socialized to repress rather than express your ability to identify
your emotions and what is bothering you has probably become a little bit disorganized
or broken when we see emotions as our captors or as a source of shame or we perceive them
as being stronger than us that is when we have an incentive to not feel them at all and
that results in that inability for expression and release.
To get past this we can do a few things and I'm going to talk about three strategies in
particular noticing your emotions in your body talking to your friends about their feelings
and finding a creative outlet.
Paying attention to your body is so important when it comes to noticing and making peace
with whatever is going on in your mind.
We feel emotions in the body.
This has been written about so much in the last few decades perhaps most notably in the
book the body keeps the score which mainly talks about how stress and trauma in particular
have a somatic form and a somatic impact it causes chronic pain hormone imbalance so much
more.
On a smaller scale though every emotion we feel we feel it through our neurons.
Now a lot of us think that neurons are only found in the brain it's a common misconception
but it's actually not true.
Neurons are found throughout the body outside of the brain they're known as sensory and
motor neurons and our brain is in control of all of these.
It is the main communicator it is the leader.
The other thing our brain is in control of communicating with is our emotions and so there
is this connection between what we feel emotionally and what we feel physically because it is
using a lot of the same pathways a lot of those pathways are connected.
What that means is that when we begin to use physical cues to notice and identify our
feelings we can really unlock a whole new range of emotions and emotional recognition.
We didn't previously have.
For example anger is often felt between the chest and the head whilst fear is usually felt
between the stomach and the chest.
Sadness is felt in the face, in the throat even in our limbs it makes them heavy and emotional
pain can really be felt all over.
A lot of us have become very disconnected from these signs and emotional cues that are
present in our limbs and in our muscles and in our bones.
If you are struggling with emotional expression tap into what you are feeling through a body
scan and how you do that is you focus on each area of your body from your toes to the top
of your head and you pay attention.
What is causing you discomfort?
Where is their heaviness or tightness?
Where is their pent up energy and excitement and tingling?
What is that trying to tell you?
Your sensations are not there by accident that is your brain trying to communicate something
to you that you may have previously stopped yourself from recognizing because you were trying
to compartmentalize and protect yourself.
As you do that body scan consciously tense and then relax your muscles particularly your
face and your shoulders.
Now I sometimes do this when I'm trying to fall asleep and when I consciously turn my
attention to these parts of my body it's really only then that I realize just how much
just like tension and like anxiety and stress is being stored in those areas.
If you can you should do it right now let all of those muscles relax.
Let all of that tension in your shoulders go for a second and then try it again.
Let them go even looser and try your forehead.
Drop it as low as you can.
I'm literally doing it as I'm speaking right now.
Feel how your eyebrows move closer to your eyes.
Feel how everything around your skull just seems to loosen.
You might even get like a little tingle and can you notice just how much better you feel
and can you also pay attention to what's coming up for you.
That is really the first step in this process observing and discerning how emotions are
sitting in your body and what different emotions feel like for you.
Like talk to your friends about their feelings.
When we are disconnected from our emotions sometimes we no longer have the words to explain
what we're feeling and that's where talking to people you trust can be so helpful.
Not only do I think they give us a lot of language for what we're going through which
I always find super helpful they also offer support and a place for vulnerability, a space
for openness that maybe we just haven't had before but we've never been permitted access
to.
I think one of the crazy things that always comes up for me is just this constant epiphany
that you are not the only one.
Nothing is experienced in isolation so much of what we experience in our 20s and beyond
is universal and it's made a lot easier with community and support and someone who is
going to sit across from you and say I'm witnessing your life.
I see what you're going through that is really really hard.
Hearing someone else say that validates so much of what we are experiencing I have had
that happen where just someone says like I'm so sorry I can see that must be so painful
and just that acknowledgement like makes me burst into tears.
I think become really curious about other people's emotions as well ask questions.
Listen, other people crave to be heard as much as you do and in response share your own
feelings.
You know as humans we have this beautiful superpower that we can connect through emotions and through
vulnerability and as we get better at being vulnerable with other people we get better
at being vulnerable with ourselves having a sense of acceptance that this is okay this
is normal.
Other people are experiencing this I'm not defective I'm not faulty there is nothing
wrong with me.
And the tears might not come instantly but there is this increased level of acceptance
and this increased level of recognition for what you are actually experiencing and this
just this increased level of just kindness in your life which I think everyone can really
benefit from.
Finally, look for an outlet especially one that is creative.
There is no one way to feel I feel like I have mentioned that a million times in this
episode there are so many other ways we can channel what's happening in our bodies firstly
but also in our minds into something that is tangible and it doesn't have to involve
tears or crying.
When that thing that we choose to use as our outlet is creative or physical it also
allows us to use these parts of our brain that we may otherwise be neglecting or just
not using as much.
It makes us feel less inhibited it frees parts of us that otherwise have nowhere else to
exist as the power of creativity.
And I've talked about this on the podcast before but after my first big break up I tried
anything creative or with my hands that I could I did painting I did pottery I even did
weaving for a while it's not as fun as you think it takes ages but it just felt like my
brain was opening up and noticing a whole new world both externally and within.
There is a reason why art therapy is so popular because we are finally waking up to the fact
that doing something purposeful and meaningful and artistic and creating something rather
than always feeling like the world is taking things from us.
It helps us regulate what we're feeling.
Our emotions are a huge source of inspiration and they want a place to go they are looking
for an outlet and maybe right now that's not crying for you but I think the more you
further you get in this process the more everything else seems to loosen up.
If you want some further evidence of this there's a really well-known UCL study that was
conducted in part with BBC Arts and what they found was that when they gave people the
space to be creative especially in response to big large scary emotions it didn't actually
matter if they were even objectively good at it it was just the participation in the
act that counted.
Make bad art express everything and anything and you will slowly see how your access to
your emotions becomes expanded because you begin to see them in a positive light as
a source of inspiration and motivation and of creativity.
Finally I say this in a lot of these episodes because I just think it's so true be gentle
with yourself.
Imagine that the person sitting in front of you who is struggling with their emotions
with their ability to cry is five year old you wouldn't yell at them you wouldn't shame
them you wouldn't get angry at them.
I know it's frustrating I know sometimes we just long for that catharsis and release of
a good old fashioned cry but you are not defective you are not faulty you are not a psychopath
because that isn't available to you at the moment.
There are so many reasons and very valid explanations for why this is but there are also
so many ways through.
You are doing the best you can you're probably managing a lot in your life right now and
your brain is trying to help you in some way but I often find when we finally get to a place
of feeling emotionally safe and secure the tears will come.
So thank you so much for listening to today's episode I hope you got something out of it
I hope that you enjoyed it I hope that you learned something from my experience you
know that's always the mission with these episodes is being like you know your 20s feels
super isolating I'm there with you you're not alone there are so many people who are
going through something similar as always if you did enjoy this episode please feel free
to leave a five star review on Apple podcasts Spotify whatever you are listening I you know
I don't know if people really know this it's kind of just me running this podcast I don't
really have like a huge team so I'm still the one who reads all of your messages and all
of your reviews and all of your comments and it really makes my day so also if you have
an episode suggestion I say this at the end of every episode please feel free to DM me
at that psychology podcast I would love to hear what you have in mind and if you want to see
what I'm doing in my own life as a 20 something year old feel free to follow me at Gemma
Speg on Instagram and we will be back on Friday with a new episode until then stay safe and
we will talk soon.
Oh our 20s the drunk Diling the forgetting to wash our face at night and yes neglecting
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