Tears stuck in your throat hurt worse than tears dripping down your cheek. My mother told me, but I never listened.

I learned early to cram those tears deep into my soul, like packing gunpowder into an antebellum rifle.

People tell me shame is the best ammunition: a cluttered conscience, failure, an unfinished task. Mold each one into the perfect bullet and pack it in deep with all the fear you can muster. The fear that you might really be who you think you are.

Not who you think you are on the good days. You want to fill that gun with the fear that you might be nothing more than the person on those tired mornings who goes back to sleep because being awake seems too much to bear. The sickly perfect blend of self-loathing and despair that makes your shoulders hunch and your face collapse and your every thought feel like trudging through knee-deep sloshy mud in the winter.

Pack it in deep, because all those tears and shame and fear are going to explode one day, and you want them to go off like a cannon.

No, not like a cannon – that’s over too quick. Stifled tears tend to come out like a carefully crafted fireworks display. The first white lights will drizzle down on the unsuspecting people in the crowd who are just trying to finish that savory hot dog and flirt with the right boy and chase down those unruly children. These softer bursts will be restrained: relationships slipping, focus distorting, perfectionism failing, control unraveling.

Once the crowd is warmed up – then come the big explosions. The booms and cracks that make the baby’s eyes go wide for an eternity while the parents hold their breath waiting for wails that must surely follow. The budding affair, the suicidal thoughts, the worsening addiction.

The show is just getting started, though. While the crowd watches with jaws unhinged, the fireworks build through that dark crescendo toward a terrifying climax where the unthinkable becomes the inevitable. The secrets are discovered in violent rage or quiet despair, the addiction becomes all-consuming, death by suicide seems like the only option.

I could go on, but it’s just too hard to stomach right now. Reality often is. Sugar-coated daydreams go down much smoother. If only life were a daydream.

The truth is, life is a mix of sweet and bitter, beautiful and tragic. When we deny the bitter parts, they become the stuff of tragedy. When we cram the tears down inside like ammunition into a cannon, they come bursting out in horrible colors we never could have imagined. Too often, wounds go unhealed and wound others. They lash out in unexpected and violent ways, and we realize too late what we had been denying and avoiding.

The alternative, then, is to name the hurts that haunt us. If we can hold a steady gaze toward the ugly parts of ourselves and the world, we take away some of their sting. That twisted part inside is not nearly so frightening when you bring it out into the open and call it what it is: an absent parent, a lie you’ve been telling yourself for too long, an unfaithful partner, shame about how you look or what you can afford or who you love, a disappointed authority figure, abuse, clinical depression, eating disorder, addiction.

People tell me that naming our hurts has a mystical healing power, and I have found this to be true. An ancient writer used the unfortunate dichotomy of “dark” and “light” to declare that “anything exposed to light will itself become light.” Of course, dark can be beautiful and light can be awful, but these are just words. You get the point: When we face our ugly wounds with courage, they can morph into something beautiful.

Today, I choose to name my hurts and to wait for healing. I will be gentle with myself and with others. I will cry, and know that tears can be beautiful so long as I let them out. I will accept that life is a mixture of bitter and sweet. Today, I will embrace the ugly, knowing that tomorrow brings something beautiful.