Toxic Positivity and a Recovering Positiver

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

Home is Where...

“This is home,” my friend says to me. “This is home.” 

Struck by the feeling in her words, I look out at the sunset that we’re watching together on the roof patio above her house which serves as the porch to my little separate apartment and temporary residence for the next three months. Orange rays beam up from below the mountainous horizon to complement the blue of the darkening Mexican sky. A fan of light. Below that, the mountains slip into a deeper shade of dress. A dog barks. A vehicle, its PA system announcing the selling of something, Churros? Paletas? Jugo? begins its street by street roaming. “That’ll go on for the next twenty minutes,” my friend says. We’re sharing a bottle of wine which she’s said she’s saved for a special occasion. Sunset is a special occasion. Cheers, salud, prost, I’ll go for that.  

I take a sip. It’s a good wine. Something red. Something dry.

Leaned up against the roof wall, I gaze down at the brick and tin of the homes crammed in next to each other behind the wall of her property, at the green, white, and red flag that flies from the top of a house just beyond those, at the lights that bespeak of the residences built along the foothills and up the incline of the not-so-far-off mountains, at the trees that fill in the empty spaces, at the telephone lines that crisscross my view. It’s been a long time since I’ve called a place home. Flitting about the world, barely letting my feet touch ground as I go, I haven’t wanted to.

Every now and again, there have been places that felt homelike or homey. There have been places that I loved. There have been places to which I would return. There’s even the place where I grew up and where a good portion of my family still lives that is easily called home; a place to go back to and then take leave of again.

But home, Home, that place I wouldn’t want to ever leave for long, that place that would draw me back to it when I had the temerity to venture off, that place where I would stick my feet down like roots into rich dirt to stay in forever? That place I haven’t had for a long time.

And when my friend says, “This is home,” I realize I don’t want that for a long long time either. Not yet. If ever.

What is this spirit of non-attachment?

Is it just the feeling that wherever I am is home?

That the world is waiting and there’s so much to see?

That belonging is more than a sense of place?

For now, it doesn’t really matter if I can’t answer all my own questions.

The wind blows my hair across my face. The stars begin to blink into view. My friend adds some wine to my glass and to hers. We sit with our words on the tips of our tongues and let them out as we see fit. Drinking our wine, spilling out our conversation.

When they’ve played all they can on their own, my friend’s children venture up to where we are and fill the patio with their chatter, presence, and questions. We look upwards and piece together the constellations and planets, spinning on our toes from compass point to compass point. “That’s Jupiter. That’s Antares. That’s Scorpio. That’s Cassiopeia. That’s the Big Dipper.”

It’s a school night and soon enough, before they want to, they go downstairs to get their lunches packed and to get ready for bed.

Left alone, with the stars to still keep me company, I look around again. Home? A pack of dogs sound out in their first howling of the night. The roosters are quiet; long ago tucked in to roost. No, not a home with a capital H. But, nevertheless, it’s a place where I can practice spontaneity, be open to fresh ideas, meet new people, participate in the strangeness of human community, and stretch myself beyond my own hermetic habits. Not home for me, and yet, for my friend, this place is both her home and Home and for a short time I can share it with her.

That’s enough. That’s enough for now.