Is Toxic Positivity Sabotaging Your Actual Happiness?
I have to confess something to you guys.
With approximately 18 months of blogging under my belt, I feel ready to come clean about something that has been holding me back. Even before I became a blogger (read about my blogger journey here), there has been a force in my world that has held me back from really going for it. It’s the reason that I was scared to start blogging. It’s the reason that I struggle with interpersonal relationships. I finally have a name for this force that has infiltrated my life and probably yours, too.
Toxic Positivity
What is toxic positivity? Well, it’s not a phrase you’ll find in Webster’s dictionary but it is a term that has been popping up in the online space - specifically the self-help space - as of late.
Toxic positivity is practice of portraying yourself and your life as extremely positive, happy, and perfect. It encompasses the belief that if you are just happy all the time, no matter what, that the rest of your life will fall into place. Inversely, it is a belief that bad things happen to those who allow negativity into their lives. Toxic positivity is particularly prevalent in the multi-level marketing community (think Lularoe and Arbonne) and the manifestation community.
That is not to say that everyone who is in an MLM or practices manifestation is toxically positive but it is certainly a tactic used by up-lines and “gurus” to explain why vulnerable men and women who are buying into their brand are not having the promised successes. They are simply not trying hard enough to be positive and therefore, successful.
I have often seen the same type of behavior from bloggers in the lifestyle blogging space. Everything is awesome all the time and they live a life is grand and aesthetic AF, to boot!
Does this feel or sound familiar to you? Probably. This mindset of only allowing yourself to be positive can be extremely damaging.
A Totally Normal Range of Emotions
As humans, we are meant to experience a wide range of emotions. Emotions are neither good or bad. Anger and fear are not inherently bad emotions. Likewise, happiness and security are not inherently good. They are simply emotions that we feel and are all in the realm of normal.
Of course, if you are always angry or always fearful, that is problematic. Our emotions are tied our overall health and well being on the cellular level. This can have downstream effects on our bodies and minds. But inversely, being happy all the time is not good for us either.
Because it simply isn’t possible. This is not toxic negativity. This is a fact of life. Those who are acting as if they are happy all the time are likely swallowing negative feelings instead of facing them front on.
How Does Toxic Positivity Effect Us?
If I have learned anything from years of therapy, it’s that facing our emotions is the only way to set ourselves free from them. Ignoring a problem or a fear or a sadness doesn’t make it go away. We just have to carry it around longer. And that shit gets heavy after a while.
You cannot outrun your problems. You have to face them head on. And that is scary as all hell but it’s so much more genuine than ignoring them.
We don’t need to present ourselves as always positive to feel the effects of toxic positivity. Because, as humans, we tend to compare ourselves to others.
“Comparison is the thief of joy” - Theodore Roosevelt
We have all heard that phrase. It’s so well known because it’s true and it’s powerful. But here’s the thing, comparison is just a part of being a human. Much like we use stereotypes to understand the world around us without overloading our brains with information, comparison helps us to understand our world and our place in it.
If your social media feed is full of women who never have a bad day, you are going to begin to worry that your bad days mean that there is something wrong with you.
There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with having a bad day (unless you let your bad days become excuses to participate in damaging behaviors).
If you don’t have people in your life that are sharing their bad days, you might feel a little (or a lot) isolated by your crummy mood. You might feel less than because you can’t be positive every single moment of every single day.
You wanna know a little secret? These women, who vision board their dream lives and manifest their white Mercedes through sheer will power and positive attitude, they have bad days, too. But showing you their bad days would ruin their brand and undermine the life they’re trying to sell you.
Sure maybe a small fraction of these people truly have wonderful lives and don’t experience much adversity or tribulation. They can be happy and free of worry most of the time but that isn’t because they’ve willed wonderful lives into existance by being optimistic about everything. The reality is that these people probably don’t take a lot of big risks.
Is that really the kind of life you want to live?
I know people who don’t take big risks. Who live the lives they think they’re “supposed to". On the surface, they are happy with their 9-5 job, 3 bedroom house surrounded by a white picket fence, and 2 and a half children but are they really going for it or just playing it safe?
As for the rest of them, they are just not showing you the hard stuff either because they are afraid of being real or because they don’t deal with the hard stuff at all.
So, you have to ask yourself…Do I want to really go for it or do I want to play it safe? Do I want to show and be my true, authentic self without care or do I want to be the person who crafts their image meticulously?
Why Should We Care?
At the end of the day, this doesn’t have to effect me at all. If some chick wants to build her brand around her perfect off-white with touches of rose gold and blush pink life, it doesn’t actually impact me at all. Not once I recognize this influence and release it from my life.
I have definitely not been shy about sharing my struggles here on the blog and on my Instagram. I’ve talked about my difficulties with anxiety, depression, and endometriosis. But these posts are have been guarded and edited.
Something I’ve struggled with is putting myself out there on the daily. I don’t get on Insta stories often. I have done some vlogging but never posted the content to YouTube because I’ve worried that I’m not likable enough; that I can’t put on the show my audience wants to see.
I could get in front of a camera and put on an act but that seems exhausting. So, I just haven’t jumped in. I’ve made myself smaller because I know that I can’t be just like them.
I know myself. I am not the world’s most bubbly female. I am often snarky, sassy, and sarcastic. While I enjoy a pedicure and mimosa brunch as much as the next girl, I’m definitely a little rough around the edges. And the women who I see doing what I want to be doing with any level of success are pretty much super happy, sweet, bubbly ladies.
Some of them are genuine and true to themselves, I have no doubt about that. Still, there are some who, on closer inspection, are definitely faking it til they make it.
I feel like I can’t compete in a community of beautiful girls who are always happy and never swear or complain about anything difficult in their lives.
Because I’m a certified hot mess express. This is not self-doubt or pity. This is just the way it is. I am forever bumbling around, losing my train of thought, losing my keys, making mistakes, saying stupid things, being short with others, and generally not having it all together.
As a result, I gave up on myself before I even tried. Toxic positivity lead me believe that I wasn’t enough and that I wouldn’t be successful because I couldn’t maintain a visage of perfection.
But this is fucking nonsense.
A picture of me looking less than perfect but HAPPY AS FUCK
So, I did something about it. I unfollowed people in my online life that made me feel less than and exuded fake confidence. And I am working on changing my relationships with people in my real life who do the same.
I’m not here to tell anyone how to live their lives but I am here to tell you that if you have felt the effects of toxic positivity in your life, you can break free.
You can find humans to engage with that are real and raw and unedited. People who experience the same wide, complicated, messy range of emotions that you do. I hope I can be one of them and that you’ll stick with me on my journey to becoming my true, authentic self.
And yes, I realize that that last sentance sounds like a load of self-helpy, The Secret-y bullshit but the truth is that you can be a badass, dream manifesting, self-loving boss babe AND anti-toxic positivity at the same time.
They are not mutually exclusive! I love self-helpy stuff (check out my list of non-nauseating self-help titles here!) It’s all about learning to embrace your emotions and try to learn from them instead of stuffing down the ones that society tells us are bad.
Ask yourself the question “why does this make me anxious and how do I work through this?” instead of wondering why you experience anxiety at all while your favorite Instagram influencer has a the most perfect life ever.
Because comparison truly is the thief of joy! But we can find our joy again when we use our comparisons to learn something about ourselves instead of throwing ourselves a pity party and chalking it up to bad luck.
Toxic positivity is just that…toxic. It is not real. And realizing that someone you constantly compare yourself to, that makes you feel bad about yourself is just faking it is freeing. It is powerful. It’s Gianniana Milady Gibelli getting down on one knee to ask Damion to marry her. It’s the Red Sox winning the World Series in ‘04. It’s big.
Even just telling my tiny corner of the internet that I have been playing myself down and hiding for fear of not APPEARING happy enough has felt like a weight on my shoulders - like I can go forward and just be a normal human who experiences normal things. This change probably won't happen overnight but it’s a goal. It is going to take work. I will probably fail a few times. Maybe more but I am committed to seeing this through.
If anything in this post has rung true or stirred something in you, I encourage you to examine the media you consume and the friends you keep. Are any of these people putting out vibes of an unobtainable amount of happiness, perfection, and good luck?
Listen to your gut and make decisions about the kind of influence and presence that person is going to have in your life going forward. Adjust accordingly. Maybe you’ll do a happy dance. Maybe you’ll feel sad about letting go of something you believed to be a valuable part of your existence.
It’s all valid. It’s all real. But it doesn't mean you have to hold on to a relationship, however shallow or deep that relationship is, that doesn’t serve you.
If you want to hold on to it, it’s time to get real about the boundaries of that relationship. Work within the confines of those boundaries. Examine and adjust often.
Because you deserve true happiness and appropriately proportioned positivity in your life. Because you are already enough and you have everything within you to build a life of your choosing. You just have to pick up the tools and get to hammering.
