"Positive vibes, positive vibes, positive vibes". This is the current common sentences people repel to raise a better feeling. Have you ever heard that before? I will begin the story from the breaking news that has been so loyal greeting us in the morning right after waking up everyday. The overnight sleep might bring either peace or a heartbreaking nightmare. However, we will quickly grab our phone to check out the world's updates, and just like the other day, it is bombarded with bad news, again and again. The bad mood often spontaneously calls his best friends such as overthinking, or even worse, it replays the bad memories of our past. Therefore, ironically, the mind keeps telling us to maintain feeling good.
Being in a certain positive mind is somehow tricky and full of hidden truth. This phenomenon is popular as toxic positivity. Some positive thinking is toxic, because it hides the truthful story just to make our mind feel relaxed. In other words, it fools ourselves in a moment but then invites bigger disasters in the future. Some of them are deadly poisonous to our realistic way of thinking and make the concrete problem become biased. Even more, it is slowly killing our state to be logical.
1. I am Fine.
No, you are not. Absolutely there is no such always feeling fine. The whisper suggestion to say "I'm fine" to your mind is an unseen lie. The more you say that you're okay means you're very not okay and something wrong happened. Contrary, to believe in these words means postponing the problem to get worse and bigger later on. That is why to normalize and admit the negative emotion is a good start to heal sooner.
2. Don't give up.
It is okay to give up yourselves if the condition is no longer worth fighting for. Remember, many factors are out of our control such as the result of our struggle. Failure does exist, and not every work is beautifully ended in success. However, some of them came as a learning process which eventually grew us stronger.
3. Everything will be okay.
No, not everything. Some of the bad experiences come as teachers, yet not all of them will teach us softly. The sooner we accept that negative problems are part of our "student of life" journey, the easier it will be to move on.
Toxic positivity is a real trap that will neglect our truthful emotion. However, the wiser belief is when we can start our learning on acceptance, including how we admit the negative emotions and be friends with them. This will help us to process the hurtful feeling and make it possible to heal and take the self control back.
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