The Toxic Aftereffects of Positivity

You wake up in the morning, dreading the trip out of your cosy bed. So you do what everyone else does; take your phone and settle yourself in for a scrolling session. But something was off today, you felt worse than usual, groggy and tired, with an unusual urge to cry. A bright feed resembling unicorn vomit greets you. On other days, this sight would be welcoming, setting your day up for the best, but today it made your head hurt.

You try your best to get out of the bed, brew yourself a cup of bitter coffee and you sit with it. But as someone who is active on Instagram, you can’t sit still. So you place your coffee and put in the effort to take aesthetic pictures with perfect angles and lighting. Regardless of your internal feelings, your image on Instagram was that of a person who had their life together. After using your entire day’s quota of energy on taking a photo, you collapse onto the chair. The coffee has become cold waiting for you. Your fingers swipe across your phone, trying out different filters and editing techniques, making the photo unnaturally perfect. But your eyes are giving up and your fingers slow down. The day had already started off bad and here you were putting in an effort trying to portray a perfect life.

What was the need? You upload the first photo, raw with no editing. It is slightly blurred, a byproduct of your morning blues. And you write a simple tagline. “What a soso day.”

Don’t mask all your feelings, emotions and worries with an “Everything's ok” because sometimes everything is not ok. And that's fine. We can’t, as human beings, just choose only the emotions we want to have. It simply doesn’t work that way. Feeling all our feelings, painful or not, keeps us grounded in the present moment.

You have to accept whatever genuine feelings come up, sit with them, and then let them pass on their own. So before uttering another Hakuna Matata, consider the consequences. It can be life-altering.