On Toxic Positivity and such things..
We are all guilty of it.
Because right from our childhood, we are taught to stop complaining and “count our blessings”, to pick ourselves up when we fall and to exhibit a “winning attitude” all the time.
Sure, positivity is a good thing. But the constant reminder to stay positive pushes many to go overboard. Often, at the wrong time, at the wrong place, and in a wrong manner.
And that’s what I have been observing since the beginning of the pandemic. Right from my very close social circles to social media influencers & celebrities, this push to stay positive all the time has started annoying me quite a bit and has exhausted me thoroughly.
For the first few weeks, when the whole world went into a lockdown mode, there certainly was a sense of confusion and uncertainty — all of which made us lean onto our social groups much more than before, primarily on social media. We were all trying to figure this out. We were all trying to make sense of the unknown.
And then there was fear. Nothing brings people together as fear does.
When we heard about someone we knew having caught the virus and going through the absolute worst, there was sadness. The privileged amongst us indulged in new hobbies to distract us from the news of gloom and doom. We baked, we cooked, we painted, we sang, we danced, we worked out, and we tried to create a new normal. Or at least that’s what we called it so we could feel safe inside this bubble. I did too. But what I didn’t pay attention to was how even then, there were a few, who took it upon themselves to overdo the whole positivity thing. It started hitting me only after a few months into the pandemic.
And this post has been asking me to be written since then.
Why do some people find it compulsive to push away sadness and fear?? Why do they want to force themselves and others to be positive all the time? According to psychologists, this idea of forcing ourselves and others to stay positive can be harmful to our mental well-being and our relationships. Practicing false cheerfulness — which they call “toxic positivity” — keeps us from addressing our feelings, and the feelings of others.
During the past 18 months or so, what has been truly annoying to me is the latter kind. The ones who “force positivity” on others. Social media, by its very design, does this very passive aggressively —i.e. the forcing on others part.
As a very regular and an active user of all the big social media platforms, I can say quite vehemently that most people use social media platforms as a highlight reel of their every day lives. And that idea got exponentially worse during the pandemic.
By sharing your awesome workout video and saying how you are getting through the pandemic by staying positive, keeping fit, and why someone else too should buck up and go out for a run or do something else ‘productive’, you are basically invalidating that someone’s emotion and are being totally dismissive, because you just don’t realize how your posts reach that individual, let’s say someone, who perhaps is in an emotional pain due to whatever reason the pandemic brought.
Not only are you diminishing their feelings, you’re telling them that you are a better person for not letting such feelings affect you.
It took me a few months to understand that I too perhaps was in the “Everything happens for a reason, it is what it is. Stay positive!!” crowd and how insensitive that would have come across if I had said this to someone who was actually going through the worst.
When I am around “just think happy thoughts” pollyanna kind of sugary person, I am not sure if that person is capable of understanding the depth of my emotions and feelings that I find myself under. Even if that friend might have the best intentions in the world, the message they are mindlessly sending to me is, “if you want to stay near me, you gotta stay happy and positive”. That puts a filter right there and it makes me pretend like a person I am not, when I am around this friend.
I get it. I get the fact that we just don’t want to feel bad. Who wants to? And we don’t want the people we care about to feel bad, either. So most of toxic positivity comes from a place of good intentions. I totally get it.
However, there is a gray line between being positive and becoming toxically positive, and that line is hard to read because we don’t treat emotions as data, and instead we treat them as “good” and “bad”. The moment we start treating emotions as emotions, and as signposts of the state of mind, then compassion will follow naturally.
Look. I am not dunking on positivity. Far from it, actually.
At the end of the day, all of us do want to stay positive and I don’t think I question the undeniable power of staying positive. Maybe it’s just me over-analyzing this concept of toxic positivity based on my personal experience over the past couple of years, or maybe there is some truth in this. Either way, I do believe a healthy human being should be conscious of how they show up in the world — how they present themselves to others. If I find myself as a transmitter of toxic positivity all the time, it’s time to reflect and change. Finding a balance and the acceptance of both “good” and “bad” emotions is far better for everyone’s mental health than sticking with and forcing a monochromatic mindset.
After all, we have already complicated our otherwise simple existence in this planet enough through thousands of years of our own doings, haven’t we? Why complicate it further? Why don’t we embrace our life as it is — for all its beauty, pain, and imperfectness?
