Emotions are a rainbow of possibilities and each serves as useful evidence for action and being, Dr. Sarah Tracy said after the Toxic Positivity Lecture with Nora McInerny.
Arizona State University (ASU) and Project Humanities host a signature lecture each year and on March 25, 2021, over Zoom Conferencing, they celebrated their 10th year with a special guest lecture from Nora McInerny; a bestselling author and public speaker.
Fans of McInerny’s, students and alumni of ASU, as well as followers of Project Humanities, tuned in to watch the lecture facilitated by ASU’s very own Professor of communication, Dr. Sarah Tracy. McInerny is not shy about topics that are hard to talk about, and she brings humour to them in a graceful way. She doesn’t believe in the silver lining of hard situations: those situations are hard.
“I’m not anti-positivity, I am pro-positivity in the right context. Suffering and struggle and grief and gratitude, [these] are not opposing forces,” she said. “A fully loved and realized life are all of these at once.”
McInerny wants to differentiate between positivity and toxic positivity – the denial that anything can be bad. Her search for that middle ground began after the death of her husband when many wondered how she could laugh during the following days.
What they didn’t know was that nights were much harder. “Denying anything that’s not a positive emotion is a betrayal of our reality,” she said. Dr. Tracy was able to shed even more light on how negative emotions can be beneficial and create good without denying the bad.
“Sadness can spur us to connect with those who are close, anger can help us to draw boundaries, and fear can alert us to stand back. So, the goal is not to create neutrality, but to create a presence to what is so, not make it wrong and ask, ‘what is this emotion trying to teach me’.”
Those that attended had positive responses to the lecture and felt that even beyond the grief and toxic positivity that McInerny spoke about, it was a struggle that applied to many situations.
“I have been dealing with toxic positivity a lot coincidentally, I’m transgender and have been transitioning for a little over a year. I have been dealing with depression and anxiety as well, and there’s a lot of, ‘just pretend everything is good’ that I can’t really keep up with,” Patricia Gauronskas, a follower of Project Humanities said.
Chelsey Syrnyk, a long-time fan of McInerny added, “It was wonderful and I’m glad I got to experience a new group of people that I haven’t heard of and learn their perspective beyond Nora’s.”
“This inability to at least acknowledge or normalize it to say, ‘oh yeah, hard things they’re hard,’ it inhibits growth, it inhibits connection, struggle to that very nature and growth to that very nature hurts, and it requires change. Renewed purpose and perspective takes time,” McInerny stresses. “It is not an immediate thing, it requires the acknowledgment that something hurts, that someone is hurt in order to grow. In order to fix literally anything, you need to be able to identify the ways in which it’s broken.”