On Not Being a Crier

I'm not sure if I've addressed this before on the blog, but I am not a crier. I've never cried while listening to a song, or watching a film, and I've certainly never cried while reading a book. Never. Ever. And I tend to not tell people this because I always hear the same thing:

"OMG You've never cried at a book/film?? Are you even human??!!! Do you have a soul???"

Are you fucking kidding me? Another one is this, courtesy of Tumblr:

"If you've never finished a book crying or asked yourself what you are going to do with your life now after you completed the last page, you’ve never read a good book."

Alright, Imma bout to prove this crock of shit wrong (well, at least I think it's a crock of shit).

Nobody has a right to tell you what the right or wrong way to enjoy a book is. It's not like I'm reading and just not feeling anything at all. I'd say that I'm more of an internal crier. Just because you can't see what I'm feeling on the surface, and my eyes aren't streaming rivers, that doesn't mean that I'm not feeling a lot of things on the inside. Let's take my review of Scott Westerfeld's Goliath, for example. I freaking loved that book and my review for it is really long (my reviews for all three books in the series are long), talking about my feels and the stuff, and being hit with the reality that my favourite series was over. But did not crying at the end of that book mean that I hadn't read a good book?

HELL NO.

Let me get a little personal here. When my grandfather died when I was a kid, I didn't cry. Not a single tear. Heartless, right? Not at all. I was sad, but I've never been an overly emotional kind of person. My brother, on the other hand, burst into tears straight away and cried all night. People handle their emotions differently than other people and there is no right or wrong way to handle them. 

As for the whole asking yourself what you're going to do with your life after finishing a book thing, I've read plenty of good books that haven't left me with book hangovers. For example, I read The Fault in Our Stars recently, and while I really enjoyed it, I didn't cry while reading it and I was completely over it after about a day in a half. That doesn't by any means necessary mean that I didn't read a good book, I'm just over it because it didn't make me feel incredibly emotional. Seriously, where did the idea that crying and book hangovers are the only signs that you enjoyed something? I've cried while playing video games that are so frustratingly hard that I hate them. There are plenty of ways to show that you've enjoyed a book, and for me, crying just isn't one of those things because that's not the kind of person I am.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with being emotional and there's nothing wrong with crying. But the idea that being so emotional that you cry is the only way to know that you've enjoyed something just seems ridiculous to me.

What about you? Are you a crier? Or are you not as emotional, like me?