Roll call: Who’s been in this situation before?
You’re on Facebook. You’re movin’ and groovin’, checking out what your friends are up to, viewing your 500th fake news article and your 1000th vacation or kids photo that you didn’t ask to see, rolling your eyes at the fact that your auntie still doesn’t understand that Google and “the Facebook” aren’t the same thing, and generally trying to People on Social Media Without Frustration. You run across one of the only friends you can attempt to relate to – the one who has chronic illness. And she’s having some issues that she’s complaining about on Facebook. You head into the comments to show her some support and love, and that’s when you see it.
“Look on the bright side, you’re alive.”
“Stay positive, honey!”
“Don’t think negatively and you’ll start feeling better!”
Does it just make your blood start to boil?
About a year ago I got into a situation similar to this. And I guess I’ve been hanging onto it for this whole time. I mean, I’ve moved on with my life and I haven’t made it part of my every day since then, because life is way too short for that. But the other day it got brought back to the surface when I saw a post by a chronic illness Facebook page I recently started to follow make a post similar to the one I’m making today. They called it “Toxic Positivity”.
Today, folks, I want to talk a little about Toxic Positivity.
What’s Toxic Positivity? Well, I would define Toxic Positivity as exactly what it sounds like and exactly like the scenario I outlined above. That would be when one person decides to do some reasonable venting, whether in private to other people or on a social media page, and the “Live Laugh Love” crowd comes along as if they’ve heard the proverbial dog-whistle of negativity, to…”brighten things up”. They point out things like a negative mind never benefited anyone, while positivity benefits everyone; that positivity is the best medicine, and there’s always something to be grateful for. Essentially, they make you feel guilty for having normal, more-than-human negative emotions.
Now let’s make one thing clear – it’s not like I’m a proponent of the glass-half-empty lifestyle. I grew up with some truly toxic family members that a few years ago I chose to disassociate with, and a good 70% of the things that came out of their mouths were just negative. Spending time with them was truly exhausting, because there was never anything good to talk about, and after a get-together you just had to spend several days away to decompress because you’d walk away in the heaviest mood that you knew wasn’t good for your mental health. My mental health was so poor during those years that I literally walked away from them with a “complex” – battling depression and suicidal ideations because I didn’t really know/hadn’t learned how to look around me for the few good things in life. That’s a process I’m honestly still learning – but I’m learning.
But like there is such a thing as Toxic Negativity (which my family had), there is such a thing as Toxic Positivity – which a lot of other people have too.
Here’s something you may not know about me – I’m a Psychology buff. (I tried to come up with a cute term for saying I stan the way the human mind works but they all sound literally balls-to-the-wall demented, so let’s just not go there.) I don’t know what got me into it, but I remember as a teen I got interested in why people do the things they do. For the brief time I went to college, my psychology class was my favorite. The human brain is an organ that only consists of approximately 8 or 9 pounds of your body, but yet it is literally 100% of who you are. A machine can keep your heart and lungs artificially beating and breathing, but if you’re “brain dead” you’re not really YOU. You can lose an entire leg and still walk. There’s even people out there who’ve lost both arms and still drive, which is amazing. Because they’ve proven that limbs don’t make us who we are. But I’ve never heard of a person who can survive, much less function, without their brain, that little 9 pound organ inside our skull that people make into disgusting looking Jell-O molds at Halloween. (Humans are weird, by the way. Super weird.) And that little 9 pounds inside our head holds a lot of COMPLEX stuff.
Human emotions are both complex and totally normal. There’s such a wide range of human emotions, and every one of them have different degrees. A few weeks ago, I was furious – for starters, I had an extremely bad DoorDash experience, above and beyond just bad customer service, and from there my whole night just went down until I was actually so furious that I had to take anti-anxiety pills just to keep myself from going into full panic-attack mode. The thesaurus says “furious” is a synonym for “mad” – but I disagree. Because I can be mad and still go about my life; but I was furious, to a point that I almost literally couldn’t function at my norm. Likewise, I can be happy but still not be having the best day of my life; if I’m having the best day of my life, I’m elated, and you’ll certainly be able to tell the difference between the degrees of my happiness. And these degrees matter, not only for the fact that I couldn’t function at my norm and had to medicate myself one day when I was furious, but because I think most of us would say that being happy is good, but being so happy that you’re elated is so much better.
Not only are there a wide range of human emotions and a baffling amount of different degrees of those emotions, but human beings can feel more than one of any of these at the same time. The night I was furious over my DoorDash order, later in the night I was happy when I finally got food. The happiness that I felt over finally being able to stuff my hangry face with Taco Bell didn’t diminish how unhappy I was over the night’s earlier events, but my unhappiness at those events also didn’t make me any less happy when I finally had a freaking chalupa in my hand about to chow down. For the past few months I’ve been trying out the exercise of finding one thing to be truly grateful for every day, and it’s been a success in the fact that I’ve realized that even on my worst days I am usually still capable of being happy about something good. But sometimes, even on my worst days, the things I find to be grateful for don’t affect my mood enough to completely turn it around – it just makes me capable of remembering that hey, I have this thing and I’m going to be alright. But that doesn’t make the bad stuff better. It just reminds me there’s a balance to life, and that while some days that balance is in my favor, some days it’s not.
Positivity isn’t inherently bad; but when you use positivity to attempt to bully a person into changing their normal, human emotions, you’re being toxic.
One more time for the people in back: Trying to make a person feel bad for feeling a normal, human emotion because you don’t like that emotion, is bullying – and you’re the one being toxic, not the person who has a negative emotion.
Negative emotions are not BAD. In fact, negative emotions have allowed humans to live, survive, and thrive for thousands of years. Fear is a so-called negative emotion, and if animals and cavemen didn’t have built-in instincts for fear, they all would have died out before carrying along their genes because they would’ve been attacked by other animals or humans and killed. We have a healthy and natural fear of walking out into the middle of the street before looking both ways because we know if we’re hit by a car, there is no next generation. We teach our kids to wear their seatbelts, look both ways before crossing the street, wear a helmet when riding a bike, and not talk to strangers because we want them to live to carry on the human race; and in essence, we’re teaching them to be fearful of these situations. And that’s okay, because that fear makes them survive.
Allowing people to vent their negative emotions makes them healthier and happier. When we don’t vent our anger, we hold it in for hours and end up stuffing it down. And believe it or not, these things don’t just disappear when we stop thinking about them. When is the last time you’ve blown up at your spouse for that annoying thing they do? There’s been a dozen times they’ve done it and you could have calmly said “hey honey, can you stop doing that? It really annoys me,” but you didn’t – because you didn’t want to potentially start a fight, you didn’t want to have to justify your reasons that it annoys you, or maybe you just didn’t want to make them feel bad when it wasn’t your intention. I know I’ve done it so many times I can’t count anymore over the 15 years we’ve been married. He starts doing a thing that grates on my last nerve, and I don’t ask him to stop until he’s done it so many times that I absolutely blow up on him. All too often, it ends up resulting in an even bigger fight, because then you blow up about a hundred other things and after half an hour of fighting you can’t even remember why you were fighting in the first place. And the reason probably is, because you finally got it off your chest. When you get it off your chest, it suddenly stops feeling like such a heavy burden, a boulder that is weighing you down. Boulders don’t just Houdini themselves into history because you stop thinking about them being in your way; they have to be intentionally moved by human beings to stop being roadblocks.
The pain and anxiety I’m feeling doesn’t mean you have to be any less happy today. I will not hold it against you if you’re having a fantastic day and I’m not. But the fact that you’re feeling great today doesn’t mean I can’t feel like complete crap. I have a right to my feelings too. Complaining about it doesn’t mean I’m trying to spread my misery. But you spreading your joy isn’t going to help me either. A positive outlook has never, in the history of forever, cured a chronic illness. There’s something to be said about looking for the positive stuff, but even after months of actively searching for gratitude in the day, my back is not healed and I am not pain-free. I am far from it, actually – despite having a generally better outlook on life and being able to genuinely say that I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time, I have been struggling with generalized depression (unrelated to my outlook on life) and my pain levels have been more intense. But I consider myself healthier because I can now identify these feelings when I’m experiencing them.
But most of all, I’m not responsible for your feelings. If I go to vent at my best friend because I’m having a crappy day, I don’t expect her to fix it. It’s not her responsibility to turn my crappy day into a good one. So don’t expect me to be sunshine and rainbows because you can’t handle healthy negative emotions. I often find this is the problem with the “be positive” crowd – they mentally can’t handle negative emotions, so they expect everyone around them to mold to fit that. The issue is that I’ve found my healthy way of dealing with mine, so in an effort to avoid dealing with yours you’re trying to take away my healthy coping method, and that’s not okay. If you can’t handle my negative moods and ask me not to bring it anywhere near you, that’s respectable to me; asking that I change what I’m physically feeling so that you don’t have to be uncomfortable isn’t.
Let me have my feelings. My feelings are how I navigate through my day as a chronic illness patient. Stop telling me to push through the pain – because when I push through the pain, I actually end up in the hospital. Stop telling me that a negative mind will only lead me to living a negative life – especially when one thing I have learned about myself is getting the negative feelings out, whether that be by talking/ranting to a friend or writing them in a journal, is actually the #1 most helpful thing to improve my mood. Stop being the prick telling me that I have “control” over how I “look at my pain”, because I’ll tell you, that prick makes me feel the least positive vibes possible in the universe.
Let me tell you, this week I have had one winner of a bad week. It has literally just been one thing after another. There has been issues with my husband’s employer that has put a massive amount of stress on me. The gremlins have been active in our house – the most random things breaking or falling down, not bad or expensive things but enough small things in a short time period to have me annoyed and believing I have a curse following me. It’s been a rough pain week, the weather is going through an awkward phase and I’ve had migraines that nothing helps and back pain that’s so bad I’m nearly in tears – and I’m currently out of the meds I use for those kinds of bad days. On top of that, I’ve just found out today that I might have lost a ton of data I can’t replace – the external hard drive I use to store my entire life failed a while back, and while I believed I had it backed up, the backup method I used may have been severely flawed resulting in all my data not being there anymore after a true, absolute failure. My family pictures, scrapbook pages, all my digital scrapbooking and digital planning purchases (in the hundreds of dollars total), everything I’ve written over the last 13 years, not to mention my business and blog stuff…could all be gone and irretrievable. I’m not having a good week. And while I’m still practicing “gratitude every day” and doing backflips to try to turn my mood around, I’m having a really hard time staying positive when it’s one thing after another. I think anyone would. Yeah, I’ve seen beautiful sunrises and heard birds singing this week and those things are beautiful, but the stress my husband’s job has put on me hasn’t gone away, and the loss of all this data is a serious blow, so a little positivity isn’t going to make things better. And I’m not going to pretend that the sun shining or the sound of birds tweeting makes everything better. It doesn’t. I’m sorry, those things are great, but it doesn’t because I might have lost a ton of stuff that’s very important to me that I’ve spent a long time building up.
I’m grateful to be alive, and I’m grateful to be in (relatively) good health. I’m grateful that I have food in my fridge and a craft stash to keep me occupied and the basic human luxuries that keep me entertained. But this is still a huge loss for me, and it’s one I won’t get over for a while – if ever, because if I can’t retrieve these things I’ll look back for years to come and remember that one thing I wrote that was really good that I lost, or that scrapbook page that I was looking forward to putting in our book but can’t because it wasn’t printed and it’s gone. All the positivity in the world won’t help me feel less bad about these things, or a lot of the other things I often complain about.
That’s not to say you can’t say positive things. But maybe the most helpful thing is to take a good look and rethink what are “unhelpful” positive things and “helpful” positive things. In other words, “re-frame” your own mindset if you really want to be a positive, helpful force on a friend who’s dealing with something, whether it’s a physical pain/illness or something else. Leave the canned platitudes on the shelf in the pantry where they fucking belong and just listen to them. If you want to say things that are actually helpful, what can you say?
- Can I do anything for you, or do you just need to vent about it?
- It’s totally okay to not be okay.
- Please don’t do your dishes if you’re in this much pain, they will be waiting for you tomorrow.
- Why don’t you sit down and read a good book?
- You can talk to me about it if you’d like.
- And, sometimes, simply saying “I’m sorry” is great.
We do not need platitudes – we have those, in spades. We need allies. We need people, friends who – even if they can’t truly understand what we’re going through because they’re not in chronic pain – will just be there and listen to us and not assault us with constant platitudes. If platitudes helped at all, not a single person in the entire world would ever be sick. Not a single person would ever die from cancer. Not a single person would ever lose a loved one. Because platitudes are like glitter – use it once and that shit spreads EVERYWHERE.
Having somebody listen to you DOES sometimes help you cope with it. It is definitely not a pill or a vaccine or a cure either, but it can go a long fucking way.
How many times have you been assaulted with platitudes by normies? Can you even still count the number or did you give up a long time ago? And what actually helps YOU when you’re feeling all the things?
P.S. – I’m hoping that WIP Wednesday posts will be back either next week or the week after; but obviously, I’ve had a lot of things going on over here and there has been absolutely no brain power to sit down and work out the first post. I’ve just been doing my best over here, but I haven’t forgotten about the blog again, or stopped trying to keep up with it. Be patient, and keep an eye out.
Floss and Fibro 