If you’re an adult in the United States, odds are you’ve been told not to cry over spilled milk. And the people who say this usually mean well. They don’t want you to sweat the small stuff, which is generally pretty good advice. If you moved through the world grieving over every little thing that went wrong, you would be grieving most of the time. You would have to take the day off work whenever you got a hangnail. 

I think it’s equally important, though, to remember to give everything its due. If you blithely ignore whenever your feelings are hurt, then you might turn into a repressed person. Did I need to cry my eyes out as a kid when Oswald (the cartoon octopus) dropped his birthday cake? Probably not. But it obviously affected me in a significant way, and I don’t need to ignore that. I need to honor where that feeling came from and let myself grieve.