Toxic Positivity: The Light at the End of the Tunnel Is Off

Since the pandemic started, we have lost so much. People, jobs, dreams, opportunities, momentum. Life, as it is, has become hard enough for us to rethink it. Undeniably, every single one of us had lost something after Covid-19 hit us. And it hit us hard. No one was prepared for it and we probably never will. While we learn how to live and lose simultaneously, life keeps its course, leaving us nothing but an unsettling timeframe to work with. Is there anything left for us to do? Yes. We must take a deep breath and think positively, right? Wrong! Lately, we have been surrounded by what we call toxic positivity, which is the belief that, while struggling with something, we must speed through our emotions. And, even though this expression is quite new, there is evidence that we are lacking an old friend: balance.

Toxic positivity is a mental mechanism in which we ignore bad feelings and deny negative emotions in order to recover sooner from an unpleasant situation. The problem is, by speeding through the negative emotions, the healing process lacks this piece of the emotional equation. There is no shortcut to utterly heal, therefore, it is crucial to listen to our body and mind and learn our own healing process.

Since it is no longer acceptable to talk about achieving perfection, we moved the focus somewhere else. We are now obsessed with the perfect state of mind: to be unconditionally and irrevocably happy, happy, happy! We forget that happiness is a state of mind to be conquered, not granted. We only know happiness because sadness exists. Both can coexist and yet, we can choose to live a fulfilling and happy life. Not all the time, but as much as possible. The idea is happiness intrinsically connected to the idea of pursuing. One doesn't exist without the other. The pursuit of happiness is what keeps us going.

Aren't we all deniers? A denier is someone who refuses to admit the truth or existence of something. Sometimes for fear, other times for lack of tools to fight the truth or deal with it. Although denial is an important element that keeps us functioning in certain circumstances, it is imperative to find room for the negative emotions as well, they are an inseparable part to the path that leads to healing.

Sometimes, acknowledgement is plenty. One particular side of toxic positivity is that one is bombarded with positive quotes, when instead we might actually need the supportive ones. There is an interesting article on Huffpost about toxic positivity with several examples of things we automatically say to one another that we might think are harmless, but are in fact, harmful and overwhelming. Especially in the light of the fact that, due to Covid-19 global pandemic, it is more important than never to take care of our mental health.

It takes time to heal. Not everybody else's time, but our own. We live in a culture obsessed with fixing things. And given the fact that mental health became a huge conversation topic these days, we seem to be eager to fix it. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with the attempts to fix whatever is going wrong in order to live a happier and more fulfilling life, the problem is how fast we want to get it over with. Healing is a daily process and living a life running against time to get it done as quickly as possible is not helpful. It is, in fact, a source of anxiety. If we take a look at the last year numbers of cases on depression and suicide because of anxiety, we will have a better idea of how urgent it is to stop toxic positivity. 

Toxic positivity seems to be the new "life is perfect" movement in the internet era. Since we can no longer sell the idea of perfection, we swerved our behavior in a different direction for the sake of keeping denial on the menu, that is part of human nature. Everyone has the right to cope with difficult times in their own way; however, we must learn to give to each other the permission to feel whatever we want to feel. After a few months since the pandemic took over globally, the new normal is somewhere between the longing for life as it used to be and the desire to go back to that life. We must mourn our losses whatever they are. If it's a small or big loss, it is nobody's job to figure that out, but you. When we allow others the space to feel, we end up learning our own boundaries and start creating the space for us as well. The more we fight it, the longer it will take for us to adjust to this new life. Life has already been hard enough, let's just let it be for a while. And whenever we're ready, we go from there.