Yes, hello.
I want to talk for a minute about toxic positivity in our world today. Funny phrase, isn’t it? Two words with seemingly opposite ideas partnered up. It’s hard to believe there could be such a thing as too much positivity, right?
I’m gonna guess the whole thing started with Facebook, everyone publishing pictures of their great days, happy moments. No photos ever of the after-dinner argument, the kid coming home drunk, the senile mother. Then came Instagram. I remember very clearly the day my photographer friend told me I’d love it because it’s all about photography, just pictures!
Which it kind of was in the beginning. With lots of fun filters and so many images of peoples’ meals and trips to Europe and sunsets on the lake. Lots and lots of moments, none ever representing the full scale of human drama. Always only the good times.
So it’s been like twenty years now since we’ve had these platforms in our lives. Twenty years since we took the photo albums that used to sit on our coffee tables and started sharing our lives with the entire world. Not sure that was a necessary move, but here we are.
Certainly many people do share their tragedies and no doubt that’s very helpful in times of loss. There are definitely small positive aspects of our sharing.
However …
one of the things we know about this moment in time is that our young people are suffering from mental health issues in ways that, say, my generation (born in 1965) didn’t. We compare, right, of course.
I have a sneaky suspicion that a lot of the mental unwellness, inability to make important decisions, unwillingness to try and fail and failure to launch has to do with the insidious fog of toxic positivity in our culture.
We are not allowed to be sad, not allowed to express grief. We are not allowed to be angry or confused. We are supposed to enjoy EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY OF OUR LIVES!
Now, to be clear, there is a message that sounds a lot like this one which I write and speak about on a very regular basis, so I want to make a very important distinction.
There is a joy that comes with living a satisfying life. An inner joy that is linked, quite beautifully to inner peace. When you are living in this space you are content in your days, living in a way that feels right to you, you sleep well at night, all internal systems humming, you are grateful to be alive.
This deep inner joy comes from living life here as an authentic human being. And will always mean feeling and expressing the full range of human emotions and experiences. It means allowing yourself to be sad when your heart is heavy with grief. It means allowing yourself to cry even when you aren’t sure why you’re crying. It means being confused and angry, when anger is the appropriate response to one of life’s challenges.
It means having the freedom to feel and express all of those things without someone telling you to stop feeling them because it’s making them uncomfortable.
You can have and live a very good life, filled with joy and gratitude and be sad, angry, tired and confused.
You will not, in fact, live a very good life if you pretend that you’re not having those appropriate responses to the events of your life.
The problem is that most of us, for a very long time now, have been pretending that everything is good! A lot of us cannot bear the sight of someone in the throes of grief. We have no idea what to say or how to act. So we pat them on the shoulder and tell them everything will be OK!
Toxic positivity.
We are not allowing others or ourselves to have and display the full range of natural and necessary human emotions. And this is a big reason why young people today are suffering in big ways from mental unwellness. When you don’t teach and model (adults on the scene, I mean you) the normal range of human emotions and how to handle them, then there becomes a kind of pile-up of emotional detritus. Then it’s a job for the professionals and though there are gobs and gobs of ‘professionals’ available today, 24/7 it’s very hard to find a good one and many people are still skittish about seeking mental health help.
We have created a culture of false positivity, we are all enrolled in Clown School, pretending that everything is OK! Avoiding the necessary conversation, making it harder and harder for our kids to be regular humans living here each day through the natural range of feelings and emotions.
You know how some people let stuff pile up in their home? At first it’s a little, then it grows and eventually reaches a tipping point, there’s just too much to clean out, so they keep avoiding it, keep avoiding it. Eventually they’ve become a bona fide hoarder and everyone is talking about the gigantic mess you’re living in, but no one knows what to do or where to start. And everyone is afraid of offending the person living in a pile of crap.
This is where we are in the emotional realm (and I would argue spiritual, too) in our lives. We have to stop pretending that everything is great! Life is so awesome! Because a lot of times it’s not, and that’s not only fine, it’s … human. Baby steps, people, baby steps. Let the tears flow, let the rage come and go. Let yourself feel all the feels. It’s all supposed to wash over and through us so we can get stronger and more resilient as we go. And maybe, maybe back off from the socials for a while. Live your life because you like living it. You don’t need the rest of the world to like it, too.
xomo
