I pray that you are familiar with the Care Bear franchise. If not, just take a step into my five-year-old bedroom and immerse yourself in the full gamut of figurines, pillows, stuffed animals, etc. For a full calendar year, I surrendered my personality entirely to this franchise. If you are still lost, picture a band of colorful bears with cute symbols on their stomachs. They’re a gang of hatred-fighting heroes with names dedicated to virtues such as “Tenderheart,” “Love-a-lot” and “Funshine.”
Amongst their number are a few outliers, such as “Good Luck” and “Wish,” but without too much stress you can connect these nebulous names with virtues like “goodwill” and “hope.” Then all of a sudden, you stumble upon Grumpy Bear. Tucked into a sea of love and joy is an entire character dedicated to grumpiness. As a 2020 version of myself might proclaim, “What the nut?”
One of my friends’ favorite jokes is my “type” in men. There seems to be virtually no rhyme or reason to it. (Sometimes it feels like my type may in fact be the opposite of whatever the last guy was.) Recently, I decided I had finally cracked the code: my type was grumpy men.
Why was it that I was drawn to the kind of man who could barely speak to me before 10 a.m.? Instead, they could only muster a bleary eyed look from beneath a mop of hair. But here’s the kicker: grumpiness is actually a symptom of fully experiencing one’s emotions. You could be like me, have fully internalized your female upbringing, and exude positivity to the point of emotional implosion. Or you could spend 42% of your day mildly grumpy because you are actually allowing your emotions to roil inside you. To be grumpy is to be unapologetically alive.
Sometimes I attempt to tell a particularly angsty seventh grader that they are allowed to be mad, they just can’t use that anger to lash out against others. This usually throws them off. We think of anger as something to be promptly extinguished. We are mostly unfamiliar with the idea that being angry or upset is just a feeling or emotion and it is indeed okay to feel that way.
Grumpy people seem closer to embracing that than anybody. They go through every day, largely at the whim of their emotions. And to me, that’s magnetic. They’re feeling them, but they refrain from lashing out. Instead, they are once again hunched over their coffee or hiding beneath their airpods.
I don’t know that grumpiness is the perfected form of experiencing one’s emotions. But it seems a whole lot better than repressing them underneath a fragile web of positivity.
Long live the grumpy ones, glowering at me from the shelter of their hoodie in the second row of my ELA class. May they glower until their emotions settle, and they can rejoin the fray once more.
Susannah currently lives in New Jersey and works as a 7th grade ELA teacher in East Harlem. When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found exploring independent bookstores, going backpacking, and trying to roller-skate on all the cool trails in the city. She is also recently experienced in the art of citrus skunk repellent (I know you’re impressed).
