Some Things: Surface Tension

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, a segment where five artists take turns delighting you with their whimsy, facts and punchlines on Saturday mornings! Our esteemed cartoon critters are Cameron GlavinAnna BongiovanniYao Xiao, and Brittney Williams. Today’s cartoon is by Cameron!


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Cameron

Cameron is an illustrator hailing from Ohio. When she’s not drawing, she’s probably very, very quietly having loud thoughts about: queer things, her eventual shop, what to watch next on Netflix, food, names for her future pets, and tumblr.

Cameron has written 76 articles for us.

27 Comments

  1. Literally started to well up while reading this because it’s so relatable, and apparently that’s enough to set me off today. It’s 9 a.m. and I’ve already cried over an article about a loon asking a fisherman for help getting untangled from a line, and then cried in the shower because I’m tired and annoyed with myself for not finishing a conversation the way I wanted to yesterday.

  2. Me also. Somewhere on this website in a Friday Open Thread or article comments section is like a 2-page essay of ways to Avoid / Manage crying in public. I think some poor straddler wrote about having uncontrolled extreme blushing and we all started to chime in.

    This comic is rad and funny. <3

  3. <3<3<3

    When my grandmother died earlier this year, I found that kind words made me fall apart, every time.

    Other times it can be anything, including the baby raccoons in the backyard holding each other's paws(!!) for comfort, having difficulty opening the top of the ibuprofen bottle, or every single time I listen to Beyonce's Lemonade.

  4. Thank you so much for posting this! I’ve been at the crying point for a week and a half now and it’s great to see that I’m not the only one that goes through this. Would you like a hug?

  5. Wow, this sums up like half of my life journey. It’s something that I think people around me hoped I’d outgrow. Instead, I’ve learned to manage it by accepting that this is a part of me and this sensitivity, this intense FEELING OF THINGS, is kind of a gift. It’s much less self-destructive for me than repression or numbness.

  6. this is so me, the last 3x i cried were:
    -failing to correctly put a decorative skin on my laptop
    -dropping a sandwich
    -when the moms on The Fosters were there for each other <3

  7. It’s the worst when you’re having a hard day at work but holding it in and then someone asks you if you’re okay and then you have to fight back even harder to hold back tears when you answer them. Showing concern! Alert! Alert!

  8. “There is a triumphant and dramatic swell in the musical score”

    CAMERON i love this/love you.

  9. This is so very, very relatable. It’s enormously affirming to see an emotional state I understand so intimately all drawn out like this. For me it often comes in tandem with an enormous sense of isolation, so next time I find myself in this situation maybe I’ll remember this cartoon and feel slightly less alone. Thank you :)

  10. Not a crier to the point people have been rude about it,but I relate so much to the last row of panels.
    The worst part about crying in public I think is suddenly having to manage other people’s reaction to your apparent emotions while trying to manage your own feels.
    *flailing*

  11. This has been happening to me for exactly a month now.
    Thank god it hasn’t spilled out beyond the safety of my house.

  12. I’ve been feeling stuff lately, and crying at the drop of a hat. I’ve never been a cryer, I’ve always been a stuff it inside, grab a bottle of whisky, and drink till you forget kind of a girl. It’s so not like me, and I’m finding myself crying because I can’t stop crying. I’m not depressed, I’m just feeling things I’ve never allowed myself to feel before and now that I am feeling, I don’t know how to stop. I think it’s on overdrive for me because it’s so foreign to me. Ive always been the calm, non emotional stoic one. That didn’t mean I had no emotions, it just meant I was amazing at never acknowledging and hiding them.

  13. Very very very me. I cry probably about once a day. One time I started crying while reading customer reviews for a certain brand of tangerines because this man had grown up eating them and then went out of his way to buy them for his kids (???)

  14. So real! I’m a stress crier, so if I’m embarrassed, I cry, which makes me more embarrassed, so I cry MORE, forever and on into a recursive wet hell spiral!

  15. Yep.

    If I’m stressed I cry. Embarassed, I cry. Angry, frustrated, sad, overwhelmed, tired. I sob loudly in movie theatres, cry if people around me are crying, I laugh til I cry.

    In public places, when you’re right at that edge, with a huge knot in your throat, trying to hold back and someone draws attention to it (either out of concern, or, like my last boss, to tell me that my tears are inappropriate and manupulative…ugh), its all over…no stopping them.

  16. I FEEL SEEN! This one time when I started crying in the middle of yoga and the girl next to me looked over very concerned, I said something like “It’s fine, tears are just stress leaving the body” and I like that description.

    Brain chemistry is weird.

  17. My favorite time (sarcasm) is when I’m at work and starting to get really worried that I messed something up and might get in trouble or something. In previous jobs, I would actually get in trouble for mistakes, so it’s a someone valid response. At this particular job though, it’s never a big deal, and it’s always fixable. I never cry when I’m beginning to stress, it’s only when it comes out that I’m not in trouble.

    Someone once told me that if you want to stop crying, start doing math in your mind. I’ve only remembered to try it once, but it sort of worked? That time I was crying because a lot of expenses were adding up and I didn’t know what to do about it, so I started doing math but that just turned into adding up all the money I don’t have. Whoops.

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