Hello Everyone, TW::// Anxiety and mental health struggles ‘Positive Vibes only’ is toxic positivity through rose tinted glasses. According to my loyal friend urban dictionary,’Toxic Positivity’ is the belief that, "if you just stay positive, you will overcome any obstacle," to such a degree that you invalidate natural emotional responses and the person having those feelings. Meaning, in an effort to maintain *positive vibes*, one disregards and refuses to acknowledge the less pleasant feelings such as anger, anxiety, sadness or guilt. I want to explore my own experience of toxic positivity but I am eager to start this discussion on a broader level. In the age of instagram, especially at its peak of being shiny-and-brandnew, people presented perfectly curated feeds, and therefore seemingly perfect lives. Of course, this is still happening but I think the rose-tinted glasses have fallen somewhat. The problem with instagram is this; it fuels toxic positivity. Naturally, people are going to show their high moments, and are not going to display their low moments, for the most part. This in itself is not surprising. However, it has served as a catalyst in modern society, for the need to always appear happy and successful. This was brought to the fore again when Covid hit. Many people were preaching productivity. We had nowhere to go so it was the perfect time to paint the shed you had been meaning to paint for the last three years, or take up a new hobby or start a business. Of course it is important to find something that inspires you, that gives you purpose and makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. It is crucial to identify what gives you hope and happiness, in such a dull time as this. Unfortunately I didn’t really see a lot of emphasis on locating hotspots for hope and happiness, online or in the media. It was about productivity and ‘look at how well I am coping in lockdown’. I posted something on my story at the height of lockdown, stating that some days I did nothing and was not productive and that was perfectly alright. I had a number of people message me, saying they too felt overwhelmed by all the *positivity* they were seeing online. We are in the middle of a global pandemic for crying out loud! Toxic positivity also presents itself in more subtle ways too. I have often found myself defaultly saying ‘positive mental health’ when talking about mental health generally. The human body experiences a whole range of emotions, so why are we so obsessed with positivity?? I mean sure, happiness is the most pleasant emotion but is it really beneficially to only focus on a singular emotion? In a world of toxic positivity, when one feels low, they are often met with phrases such as ‘it could be worse’ or ‘look on the bright side’. ‘Don’t be such a debby downer!’ - why? I have an assortment of emotions and I’m going to feel them all, dammit! At my lowest, when I felt sad and/or numb, those emotions, or lack thereof, would also be accompanied by guilt. I felt guilty because I didn’t feel happy, and I should feel happy right? That right there, is toxic positivity having a field day. I am now a firm believer in acknowledging your emotions, no matter how uncomfortable they may be. For many years, I did not acknowledge my emotions and presented to the world, a *fake* uber-happy girl who even ran a positivity page on instagram (more on this later). There is healing in stepping back and saying ‘ok I feel sad/angry/upset/guilty/hurt right now’. Never in my 21 years of life, has forcing happiness worked. Acknowledging that you don’t feel okay, allows you to take necessary steps to reach being okay, and then being more than okay. That can range from having a bubble bath, to calling your best friend on the phone, to seeking professional help. In my experience, anxiety was something that started out almost unnoticeable but got worse and worse overtime. The first signs started to show when I was fifteen - physical signs actually. I was tired, dizzy, like I was floating/out of it like ALL THE TIME and constantly getting headaches. I went for blood tests and several check ups but no known cause could be pinpointed. Only years later, after my first round of counselling, did I realise this was the first sign. So, my first dealings with anxiety were physical. Physical and mental health co-exist and mental struggles often show themselves in physical ways. When I was sixteen, almost seventeen I started to consciously experience anxiety. I say consciously, but I was so far down the rabbit hole of being known as the positive girl who gave speeches about positivity, I did not want to actively acknowledge that I was feeling anything less than what I was preaching (again, I will get to this performative positivity soon). Nearing my eighteenth birthday, anxiety was eating me alive. I started this blog in October and my birthday was the following March. That entire school year, I felt like I was drowning. Less the positive girl now but I still didn’t verbally acknowledge my feelings to any of my family or anyone who could help me or assist me in seeking professional help. When I did finally seek help, I was eighteen. I started my final year of secondary school and simultaneously started my first round of counselling. To put it into perspective for all of 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th year, I did not acknowledge what started to bubble under the surface and eventually floated above the surface. But why didn’t I acknowledge or act on it? Because I was supposed to be happy. My brain also decided it wanted to torture itself by telling me how lucky I was to be alive and that I was a discredit to all the nurses and surgeons who kept me alive, to be as unhappy and by extension, as ungrateful as I was. I had gone through so much 'worse', so why couldn't I 'just get over it'. The brain can be a bit of an asshole at times. Everyone wants to present their best selves. That is not a crime. But sometimes, in endeavoring to share the good parts of life, we start to bury and ignore the bad parts. That can have disastrous consequences, as outlined above. Performative positivity is a form of toxic positivity that I unfortunately took part in. In my 4th year of secondary school, I started writing speeches for a campaign run by my city’s mental health service. It was around this time, anxiety was starting to become more prevalent in my life. In conjunction with my new public speaking activities, I had an Instagram page that somehow turned into a place where I would post positive thoughts and mini speeches. I myself was not feeling all that positive. I rationalised this behavior, thinking if I preached positivity, soon my anxiety would melt away and I would mean what I was saying. The page got some following and people decided my DMs were a perfect place to offload their problems. I was sixteen-seventeen when this happened and it baffles me, looking back on it. I was in no way equipped to deal with any of this and having people relying on me to listen to them, made it even harder to stop the performative positivity train. Somehow I managed to escape this train wreck but this is an example of when performative positivity goes very very wrong. Sometimes it isn’t always better to look at the glass half full, or rather force yourself to see that image. Accepting our emotions for what they are, decreases the power said emotions have over us. Accepting your sadness and then confiding in a friend or recognising anger and venting to a loved one, is so much more productive than putting on a smile and entering *must be happy* mode. Our emotions are not all good or all bad, so it is natural to feel both happiness, sadness and everything in between. Psychology today says it simply; ‘While it may be beneficial to try to look on the bright side of things and find the silver lining in all life experiences, it’s important to also acknowledge and listen to our emotions when they aren’t as pleasant'. I feel as a society, we are getting better at talking about our emotions, all of them. We have definitely improved in the last 5-7 years. It is a weird one, because instagram threatens to undo all the progress we have made, on a daily basis. I hope we continue to open up about our emotions. I don’t want positive vibes only. I want all of the vibes, if you will. I want positive vibes when they are legitimate. I want it all. All the messy combinations of human emotions. I spent too many years in a numb daze. Let me feel a plethora of emotions. Let them hit me like a tidal wave. I am ready. Thanks for reading,Thanks for reading and thank you for four years of support.
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