Toxic Positivity, Masking and The Importance of a Bad Day
El Dewar shares a surprisingly empowering exploration of bad days, and spotting the restrictions of masking negative emotions with ‘toxic positivity’.
You need to be more grateful!
You should just think positively!
You’re so tough you can do it!
I have had some really bad days, some really sad days and some really, really scary days. When I started to reclaim my life after my first complete breakdown when I was 21, I used to think days that were sad, or tough, or where I just wanted to scream at the universe were failures. If I wasn’t being happy and grateful and positive then I was backsliding, returning to a place I didn’t want to be. So I would put on the proverbial brave face, lock the pain away and throw myself into productivity to prove that I was being positive.
Positivity made me miserable.
Believing that every day I had to show the perfect level of happy and bright emotions made me feel like a fake and a fraud. I was too unwell to be happy and too good at pretending to be happy to be this unwell. It is now over a decade since I lost my mind and found my neurodivergences. Now in my 30s I have learned the power of a bad day—or rather, the power of acknowledging a bad day.
I always say getting out of bed is the hardest thing I do in a day, and some days that is truer than others. In the past I would lie in bed and berate myself for not trying, for giving in, for not fighting my battles. I should be carpe diem-ing left, right and centre. “Then why” I would snap at myself, “am I still in bed with the weight of the world crushing down on my soul?! I should be being positive!”. The need to fight every battle with an empty smile made me not want to get out of bed.
I tried to live like this for a long, long time. Then one day it dawned on me—a real ‘lightbulb above my head’ moment. Why did I have to be positive all the time? Why, just because I was mentally ill, overwhelmed and suffering Autistic burnout, did it mean that I had to be positive all day, every day. Some days are (to use a family friendly term) rubbish. Some days it doesn’t matter how much of a brave face you have; you just need to have a good cry about things. Some days you need to acknowledge that things are tough and hard and sometimes just bloody unfair.
So, I stopped bottling up the bad days until they became lost weeks and dread-filled months. I started letting myself pick my battles; ok so today is tough, I didn’t get dressed today but I made myself food and did my work from the comfort of my bed. So what I didn’t tick off everything on my to do list, I took care of myself and my family—one load of washing can wait.
The Toxic Positive movement promotes the idea that anything that is not trying you best to be the most positive and perfect version of you is failing. Trying to be perfect all the time doesn’t work, it just makes you more miserable than you were to start with. Bottling up the sadness, the frustration and the tiredness means it comes bubbling out in new and unexpected ways. As Neurodivergent people we are often expected to mask or manage our needs so they don’t impact the people around us. In engaging in toxic positivity, we reinforce the societal pressures to mask even from ourselves.
I would love to say that by acknowledging the negative emotions one day, I am a success story who never has bad days. That would be a) a lie and b) counter to the idea of embracing the bad days. The bad days still happen, but I give myself the space and grace to acknowledge the negative. In pretending that bad days don’t happen, we don’t get to acknowledge when good days happen, when everything does go right. When the static quiets for a second, when we can think clearly. If every waking moment is spent masking emotions for an ideal of positive, that isn’t actual positivity. Acknowledging the good and the bad and embracing both as part of the human experience and knowing on the bad days that they don’t last: that is beyond positivity. That is hope.
