Toxic Positivity in Like No One Is Reading

I think that maybe I have been putting on a happy face for so long that I’ve driven myself into a downward spiral. I’ve pushed aside “negative” emotions, ignored them, and forced myself to focus on the positives in my life. That feels a little like, “Oh, I have cancer, but everything else is fine so I’ll just ignore the cancer.”

This article about toxic positivity feels important to me right now.

Brushing off problems rather than facing them. - check

Feeling guilty about being sad, angry, or disappointed. - check

Hiding your true feelings behind feel-good quotes that seem more socially acceptable. - check

Hiding or disguising how you really feel. - check

Minimizing other people’s feelings because they make you uncomfortable.

Shaming other people when they don’t have a positive attitude.

Trying to be stoic or “get over” painful emotions. - check

I try to never minimize another person’s feelings because I know how it feels and I never shame someone for not having a positive attitude. Everything else, though…

I’ve hurt myself so much with this. It just feels like another role I needed to play to exist in the world: wake up, put on my positivity mask, and pretend everything is just fine. Take cute selfies and be whimsical and silly and fun all to cover up the fact that my brain is constantly thinking, “The world would be better off without you.” Instead of evaluating those thoughts and trying to dispel them, I just sit with them all day, every day. I push them aside, make some attempt to distract myself, try to ignore them. Again, if you ignore cancer, it won’t just go away, and now I feel like it’s metastasized. My entire system is depressed and wants to just shut down.

I am fully aware that at least some of this is chemical-related. Starting Adderall again and trying to figure out the most effective way to use it, making adjustments to all of my medication doses to try to mitigate side-effects, all while feeling like death would be so nice and peaceful. I feel like there’s never a “good time” for these things. I don’t feel like I’m ever in a “good enough” place to make good decisions about it. I’ve felt myself spiraling out of control for awhile now and I’ve pushed it down and pushed it down to the point that I’m under so much pressure that I feel like I’m going to blow up. And all because I wanted to “stay positive.” You know, everyone says that, “Just stay positive, everything will be okay!” Just staying positive doesn’t help at all and it doesn’t make anything okay.

In bed last night, the thought that kept repeating in my head was, “Can anyone love all of me, all of the time? Do I even deserve that?” Like, I’m easy to love when I’m not falling apart, you know? But can someone love me even when I am falling apart? Should they? I don’t feel worthy and that is probably the worst of all feelings. Part of me knows that I am worthy but the other part, the depressed part, says that I am not. History says that I am not. This morning, having a meltdown with my sons, says I am not.

The only reason I never checked myself in somewhere was my kids. I knew that if I were to seek proper help and admit to some of the things inside me, someone would use that against me to prove me unfit to mother. Both of my childrens’ fathers used what mental illness I would admit to as weapons against me. That has made me feel like I can’t trust anyone with 100% of myself. I feel like people would say, “It’s for your own good,” but it would destroy me even more to lose more of my children. I would never recover from that. So I feel stuck, always stuck, spinning wheels, unable to move forward or backwards or sideways. Stuck, just sitting with all of these feelings and suicidal ideation and unable to talk about it to anyone because then they’ll worry and call someone to check on me or something and it’s all just too much to contemplate.

I’m not going to kill myself, okay. I have a lot of self-harm methods, but none of them involve hurting myself enough to die. I wish for death, I don’t seek it. Sometimes I feel like getting a call from my doctor that was like, “You have 6 months to live” would be such a relief. I’ve had a couple of biopsies over the last few years and when they all came back “no cancer,” I felt a hint of disappointment. I feel like I shouldn’t be here, I didn’t deserve to survive. It’s all too much for any one person to bear and it should have killed me years ago and probably didn’t because of sheer stubbornness on my part. I’m a lot of things, but I’ve never been much of a quitter.

All of this stems from fearfulness. I’m terrified of my own future, terrified of getting worse and never getting better. I don’t feel capable or successful even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. I feel constant shame. Oh, sure, I say stuff like, “My feelings are valid,” but I don’t really believe it. I false-positivity myself away from acknowledging and processing difficult emotions. I false-positivity myself into believing that I am capable of emotional regulation when I very much am not. I may be fooling myself (let’s be honest, I’m not) but I’m not fooling everyone and, sometimes, being and feeling so seen is terribly painful. I don’t want to be seen like this. I don’t want anyone to know these things about me. I don’t even want to know these things about me.

But these things are facts, they’re real, and no amount of false positivity is going to change any of it.