One
afternoon on my way to look up something online, I stumble across an article
about Toxic Positivity. Everything’s toxic these days. I mean, we’ve got toxic
relationships, toxic negativity, toxic masculinity, toxic toxins. The toxic is
everywhere. To drive the point home, another article addresses this very trend
and notes that Toxic was the number one word of 2018. It’s the Baader-Meimhof
Phenomenon (also called the “frequency illusion”) where once a thing is
noticed, however obscure, it’s suddenly seen everywhere, all the time. And it’s
bad. After all, not everyone touches a toxin and comes out a Mutant Ninja
Turtle. That’s the exception to the rule.
Now
sure, it’s easy to label and it’s easy to push down something like Toxic
Negativity. That seems like an obvious thing to not want. It’s easy to tell
someone to cut their toxic relationships, but this is the first time I’ve seen
positivity come under attacking scrutiny.
Holding
my breath, afraid of what I’ll discover – that I’ll fall under the Toxic
Positiver Category (god save me from imperfection) – I start to read.
The
basic message is that Toxic Positivity sugarcoats a situation with phrases such
as “Just hang in there” or “It could be worse” or “Look on the bright side”
rather than letting a person’s actual feelings of sadness, distress, anger,
etc., out where they can be resolved, worked through, or simply felt. The Toxic
Positivers usually mean well. They also, most likely, don’t quite know how to
handle their own sadness (or the unexpected gift of someone else’s sadness) which
is why a veneer of positivity seems essential. Otherwise emotions would be too
heavy to hold.
The
basic message is that these sugarcoating phrases often do more harm than good
because they can quickly, easily, and effectively invalidate a person’s
feelings and then, as the article states, even go so far as to make “them feel
bad for feeling bad.”
Of
course, it could always be worse.
But,
of course, it could also always be a little bit better. Right?
It’s
all about perspective.
Several
years ago, I learned that my way of interacting with some friends had gone
awry. They had labelled me as a bringer of, “Stupid positivity crap” and might have
even gone on to state, “which doesn’t work.”
I
was deeply hurt. Of course, this often happens when receiving an indictment
second hand. It can be taken all sorts of wrong ways. For all I actually know,
the sentence had been said in jest. But the way it had been relayed it didn’t
seem so. I took it personally.
What
hurt is that a part of me – my positive outlook on life and what I also term as
opto-realism – had been misunderstood. What hurt is that my own positive
outlook was as much for me as for them. For the world is heavy to hold. Bad
things can easily seem to outweigh the good. What hurt is that at that time, the
health issues I was dealing with on a daily basis were bearable when I saw them
as a blessing rather than a curse. A mixed blessing, but a blessing
nonetheless. What hurt is that at that time of physical pain, I could have used
a little bit of encouragement myself. A little bit of positivity. Not false positivity,
I’d already poked at every bright side I could think up on my own, but rather
an acknowledgement of how hard I went around making my life work the way I
wanted it to work. How hard I tried to give good to others – a smile, a hug, a conversation,
a word of encouragement, a gentle kick in the pants. Instead, to have my method
smashed down as if it were an animal foaming at the mouth with rabies felt like
a tearing down of my house. Of course, that’s a lot of sequential metaphors.
Now
I can see that the kind of encouragement I was wanting, that acknowledgement of
where I was and what I was going through was all they had wanted for themselves
as well. Ah, hindsight, how clever a teacher you are.
But
hindsight can be a little slow in arriving. At that time, I wasn’t in a place
to understand.
For
so long, I’d lived my life by my strict optimism, had blasted it at others (to
their apparent disgust), and then with my world-view shaken, when it came to
turning it on myself, I failed.
Physically
and emotionally damaged, I became very depressed. I threw my rose-colored
glasses in the trash and I was left with a world that was monochromatic and
dull. The message I’d taken to heart from my friends’ comment was that if my
words hadn’t worked for them then they certainly couldn’t work for me either. They
must have never worked. In fact, I must have been living an awful existence and
not even known it.
They’d
known it all along. Now I was finally catching up. Positivity didn’t work.
Stripped
of what had been nothing more than an onion skin layer of toxic positivity I
went around with a diminishing sense of worth. Am I good enough? Was I good?
Did I do the wrong thing? Have I been doing the wrong thing all along? Have I
hurt rather than helped? What’s left but all this pain? What’s the point?
There’s
no darkness like the darkness of disillusionment.
Still.
Even
if I’d been wrong all that time. Even if my friends were right. Even if the world
was full of grief and pain. Even if. I knew I didn’t like to live with the
darkness eating my heart away like an erosive disease.
Even
if.
For
yes, there is pain. There is suffering, and misery, and heartache, and regret,
and hurt, and grief so sticky and deep it feels impossible to pull one’s feet
out of.
And
yet.
As I
write this with a bit of a lump in my throat and a gathering of tears in my
eyes, as the clouds darken and build, as the roosters call out their afternoon
triumphs, as my joints hurt with the impending rain and my body’s dysbiosis, as
I sit with my doubt and my pain, emotional and physical, I know it’s not all
there is.
There
is also beauty, love, kindness, joy, laughter, comfort, contentment, hard work,
thrill, adventure, achievement, rest, magic, light, creativity, growth,
integrity, purpose, and connection.
Life
is a coin and it has two sides.
And
while that’s true, there’s a difference between toxic positivity and having a
more positive perspective regarding life and living.
I
think that’s the lesson I needed to learn through my hurt of being
misunderstood.
Toxic
is toxic. But good can also be good. What might not work for one, what might
not be the right thing in that moment for someone isn’t necessarily wrong for
all. Isn’t necessarily wrong for me. Without thinking it through, just feeling
the hurt to my marrow, I’d let my friends’ words, spoken out of their hurt
without any thought to how it might hurt me, work their way into my heart with poisonous
power. Even though my own words and thoughts and perspective had worked for me
for years and years and years, I let their comments become a truth. An absolute.
Stupid positivity crap.
The
funny thing is, we might say, this was just a clash of toxic negativity against
toxic positivity. A war of toxicity. I couldn’t abide their constant negativity
and they couldn’t abide my constant positivity. It was a magnetic repelling of
forces. The real fact of the matter was that neither of us knew how to listen
to the other. Neither of us understood or had compassion for what was needed. What
I’ve learned in these intervening years, after forgiving myself out of that
depressing time, is that the key is to be an active listener and to pay
attention to the situation.
Positivity
isn’t bad. As the Toxic Positivity article points out, if the person you’re
positiving is reacting with smiles or perking up then the positivity is likely
appropriate. If, however, the positiving shuts the conversation down or makes
the person withdraw this is a strong sign that the positivity isn’t helping.
I’ll
be the first to admit that there have been way too many times when I was an
inactive listener. I’m sure my friends’ comment about stupid positivity crap felt
true to them as I spouted my forceful positivity into their ears. In their
case, not paying attention to the signals they were sending me, I was
thoughtlessly spoon feeding them some toxic positivity. And I’m sorry for that.
But
perspective, a positive or negative perspective can make all the difference in
the world.
These
days, I’m doing my best to be aware, to be kind while giving myself the grace
to be human. That means I’m always growing and learning. That means I won’t
always get it right. Not for myself or for others. But I can keep trying. While
tuned in to the facts of reality, I can still lean toward the positive. I can
keep living with an eye calibrated to color. For the color is as valid as the
darkness. The color is just as real. Who’s to say that we aren’t all just
wearing the tinted glasses of our own choosing? Day to day, during hard times
and easy times, I can keep loving. And on those days when it all feels like too
much, I can rest in the heaviness of it all. And when I can do so again, I can
feel authentically grateful, truly appreciative of the good and bad, and not be
afraid to hold the pain and say, you know what I see you and I’m sorry it
hurts.
As
for all this toxicity, maybe a better thing for all of us to do, after
acknowledging it and its harmful effects, is simply to take the antidote. After
all, isn’t it just silly to walk around with a bunch of poison in our bellies?
The positivity
article can be found here: https://forge.medium.com/the-cure-for-toxic-positivity-155278b7daaa
