Being positive supposedly means being optimistic and hopeful in every situation. People might say it means trying to be happy and expecting positive results each time.
I beg to differ!
While that is primarily what it means, there’s more to it. All my life, I have heard “you can do it”, “you will get this” or “it will happen”. Everyone has encouraged and motivated me to succeed because everyone thinks that’s how one should be positive. That is how a person feels motivated but, people don’t realize that is also how one feels pressure. Whenever I heard that, I was quite hard on myself. I would always think “I need to accomplish this because I don’t know what I would do if I don’t”. I felt these thoughts were good and positive. It meant I was focused on one thing and one thing alone. It took me a while to realize how wrong I was. Focusing on that one thing meant I would constantly be in emotional turmoil and anxiety, which would cause me to overthink. I had undertaken so much unnecessary stress. I never questioned nor thought to change the feelings I was having. I thought it was normal and something everyone has to eventually go through. But I was wrong. Everything I was feeling was “toxic positivity” which means being happy all the time and denying any other emotion. The reason other emotions are denied is because those emotions are seen as negative. Many people don’t realize it when it happens as there is a thin line between “positivity” and “toxic positivity”. For more information, you can check out: https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/
Recently, I was faced with a failure. I thought I would suffer or become depressed but I was alright. I had another plan in mind and even if the plan I had in mind didn’t work, I had another one in place. In fact, I was happy and proud of myself for not becoming depressed. I had just discovered something amazing: optimism. This development of the new feeling made me realize how much toxic positivity I had in the past. With this new optimism, I felt content and happy because I was no longer afraid of failures. This feeling of happiness was something I hadn’t ever felt before. Even though I didn’t have much to look forward to now, I was happy and felt energized everyday. I had found a new respect for life and all my experiences.
No one talks about failures because everyone is afraid of them or feels ashamed by them which is wrong. We need to learn to embrace failures because they are the best teachers in our life. We learn more from our failures than our successes. They teach us to be a better person and help us in our self-discovery. Just like successes, they are a part of life, so shouldn’t they get the same respect we give to our successes?
Now, I welcome failure with open arms and try to learn as much as I can from it. The one thing I have learnt is to not stress over everything too much because then, I’m just surviving in life and I’m supposed to ‘live’, not ‘survive’. If it is meant to be, it will happen; and if it’s not, then it won’t. Either way, I know I will be fine.