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Why I’m Not A Positive Person And Refuse To Be

Positivity can be damaging and this is why

Often when I’m pessimistic, people around me will tell me to smile and be happy. To look at the positive things in life.

I remember when I was in high school and severely depressed and my dad told me to ‘be happy’.

I know he was trying to help, but something about those words angered me. They made me feel even more misunderstood than I already was. I remember thinking that if I was able to be happy, I would have done it already.

Telling someone to be positive is bad advice

In fact, this kind of advice is the exact kind of advice that makes me want to further crawl into my bed and avoid contact with anyone — because it makes me feel that nobody can understand me.

I know I’m not alone here too.

It’s quite the meme in the depressed community. This advice comes in other forms too and is widely shunned upon.

• Happiness is a choice
• Why can’t you just be happy?
• Your life is so good. You shouldn’t be this upset.

The reason this advice is so terrible isn’t just because it comes from a lack of empathy and understanding, but because feelings of sadness, anxiety and anger are important experiences.

Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘a smile to remember’ illustrates this perfectly:

we had the goldfish and they went around and around
in the bowl on the table near the purple drapes
across our front picture window and
my mother, poor fish, always smiling, wanting to
appear happy, she always told me, “be happy, Henry,”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can be
but my father beat her two or three times a week while
raging through his 6 foot two frame because he couldn’t
defeat what was attacking him.

my mother, poor fish, poor goldfish, poor nothing fish,
wanting to be happy, being beaten two or three times a
week and telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you smile?

and then, she always did to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw upon the earth, like hell and
hell and hell and hell, and nothing else

one day all the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on top of the water, on their sides, the
eye on each top side still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled

As soon as I read this poem, there was something eerie about the fact that the mother constantly told her son to ‘smile’. Almost immediately, I knew there was something wrong with being positive all the time.

Not because Bukowski was expressing the idea that positivity doesn’t always work, but because the experienced he displayed truly helped me understand through my empathy with the situation.

Negative feelings are feedback

Something I’ve come to learn about negative feelings is that they’re important experiences that give me feedback as to what actions I should continue doing and what actions I should stop.

I’ve found that activities like eating and sex give me such intense positive experiences because they’re crucial for my survival.

Henry’s mother encouraging smiling through all adversity with utter failure taught me that instead of accepting the pain, I should find out what’s causing it.

Her passive behaviour towards being beat actually encourages her abuser to do it again.

If I had to look at the world through this constant ‘glass half full’ perception, I would go crazy. I’d be accepting everything bad that’s happening instead of trying to change it.

Of course, I’ve noticed that there’s irrational trauma that I’ve brought with me from childhood. But most of the time, the sadness and pain I feel are telling me to stop doing what I’m doing because it’s not healthy.

It’s telling me that something needs to change.

Be grounded in reality

Instead of accepting the suffering that was forced upon her, Henry’s mother could have communicated that this kind of abuse isn’t okay. She could have left the relationship and taken her son with her. Or she could have done the million other options that were better than to just ‘smile’.

There have been times where I’ve felt like absolute shit and have constantly wondered why. There have been many things that have helped. Some have been as simple as increasing the amount of exercise I was doing and fixing my diet.

Some required more emotional enlightenment. But being positive has never helped me.

Every time I’ve felt sad, I’ve only been able to help myself when I understand that something needs to change.

Instead of being positive, be grounded in reality.

If you enjoyed this story, follow me for more. I love to analyse and write about whatever jazzes up my curiosity.

I’m currently focused on storytelling and writing about my personal experiences in order to better understand myself — and hopefully bring a little authenticity to the world.