Megan Thee Stallion Cried on Stage and the Rest of Us Cried in Our Cars

Last week, Megan Thee Stallion stood in front of a packed arena, broke down crying mid-performance, and let the whole world watch her. Most people called it heartbreaking. A few assholes on Twitter called it embarrassing.

I called it something I'll never get to do.

Here's the thing about crying over a breakup — there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and somehow Megan did it right without even trying. She didn't sneak off to a bathroom stall. She didn't fake a stomach bug to get a day in bed. She didn't tell anyone it was allergies or work stress or her mother's latest drama. She just...cried. In a spotlight. In front of twenty thousand people who sang her songs back to her while she fell apart.

Meanwhile, every cheater reading this is doing what I do — swallowing it whole in a grocery store parking lot with the engine running so nobody hears them.

The story goes that Megan and Klay Thompson had been quietly dating, it quietly fell apart, and now she's quietly devastated — except for that one very loud moment in Atlanta where she stopped being quiet about it. Apparently Klay, the basketball player who once fumbled a championship AND a fiancée in the same year, has a genuine talent for letting great things go. But this isn't really about Klay.

This is about that moment. The one where your body decides it doesn't care what's appropriate anymore.

I had one of those in a Target. Aisle seven. Trying to decide between two shampoos I didn't care about at all, when my phone buzzed with a message from my AP saying we needed to "cool things down for a while."

Cool things down.

I stood there holding a bottle of Pantene until my knuckles went white, face doing that ugly-cry thing where your mouth goes completely sideways, while a woman with a cart full of Bounty paper towels asked if I was okay.

"Allergies," I said.

That's the difference between Megan Thee Stallion and the rest of us. She gets to cry in public and have twenty thousand people hold her up while she does it. We cry in aisle seven and blame our sinuses.

Here's the holy shit truth nobody wants to say: public grief is a luxury.

When you're heartbroken in a relationship everyone knows about, you're allowed to fall apart. Your friends call. Your mom shows up with wine. Instagram floods your phone with heart emojis from people you haven't spoken to since 2015. You get a week off from holding it together. Maybe two.

When you're heartbroken over someone you were never supposed to love in the first place? You get the drive home. That's it. Forty minutes on the highway with the radio off, and then you walk in the door and ask what's for dinner like your chest isn't completely caving in.

Megan cried for maybe five minutes on that stage. I've had four-hour grief sessions in parking garages because I couldn't go home looking like that.

So respect to her. Genuinely.

Now. If you're sitting on the wrong side of a breakup you can't talk about, here's what actually helps:

Pick a villain. You need a cover reason you're sad that has nothing to do with who you're actually sad about. Work is always good. "My boss is making my life a living hell" gets you sympathy AND alone time without anyone asking follow-up questions. Use it without guilt.

Find your parking garage. You need a place to fall apart that isn't your house. A parking garage, a church lot at 2pm on a Tuesday, a Target two towns over where nobody knows your face. Somewhere you can be Megan for five unwitnessed minutes and then put it back in the box.

Give yourself a deadline. I tell myself — cry until the next red light, and then we're done. It sounds ridiculous. It works. You have to feel it or it lives in you for months, but you cannot afford to feel it forever.

Do not drunk-text your AP about how devastated you are. Just don't. Nothing good has ever come from that message.

Megan had twenty thousand people holding her up while she broke. Most of us have a steering wheel and the second verse of a song we'll never be able to listen to again.

Be kind to yourself about that.