Toxic Positivity Is Not Moral High Ground

I understand it, though; indeed, I do — most everything I have said here today, you can, too. It’s hard to hear, but don’t miss the point because your pride can’t take a hit — accept your own advice and let yourself open up a bit.

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I am tired of being assumed irresponsible because I am unstable or vice versa. I cannot even say I know what genuine stability looks like. I did not come from money; I didn’t even come from a place of emotional and mental security. I was born different, told to “act normal” without understanding the meaning of the term, and bullied into a chaotic version of conformity that I am still breaking free of. And I know it’s not only me.
Some of you walk through life and legitimately have no idea what it is like to be born left behind. Not in skill or ambition, not in intellectual capacity, but genuinely left behind because you look like you’re doing just fine. But let me explain something for the neurotypicals born into loving, healthy homes: you do not understand life outside of your bubble, and it shows.You do not know what it is to wake up exhausted by the sheer realization that you opened your eyes still in a body that hates you, a mind that tries to kill you, and a society that tells you to be grateful you don’t have it worse.
You do not understand the physical drain of breathing or the cognitive fog that no amount of therapy or drug intervention can touch — many of which worsen it.
You are not built to sustain constant instability or emotional flux; constructed not for the anguish that is existence nor to weather the maelstrom mind that tries to swallow you whole.

Not everyone wakes up and is grateful for the air in their lungs. You say it’s selfish, dramatic, ridiculous…pick your baseless assumption. Some of us wake up curious why we feel like we haven’t slept in days after having slept for ten hours. People who are not relieved to have opened their eyes to a dice roll of emotional turmoil that they would rather forget, night terrors they cannot remember weighing heavy in the fog of residual restlessness — flashbacks of memories that feel so far away but somehow overwhelmingly fresh.

It baffles me — disturbs me, to my very core, to know that many of you look down at us from your high horses thinking you know better.
You offer us pity masquerading as compassion. Dangle your keys to happiness and stability in front of our faces, never seeing that you built the gate. You allow yourself to believe that you’re only trying to help and know better than us what we need. Create an environment where your experience supersedes our own because you see the stigmas you have created in us — because our symptoms only matter when they bother you; we can go fuck ourselves.
The truth is that we did not ask for this struggle any more than we asked for your opinion of our reality. We do not need your lack-of-perspective-fueled superiority complex driving us into the closet, gluing masks to our faces, so no one notices our pain. We are tired of hearing your unsolicited advice on altering ourselves to fit a mould that wasn’t built for us. All because it makes you uncomfortable.

We speak of our divergencies and are told how to “cure” them. We talk of our trauma, and we are shamed, pitied…turned into dishonest villains, and demonized for choosing ourselves over an abuser’s reputation.

We express an emotion, and you think it can be changed. You convince yourself that if we “just” concede to your guidance, everything will change for us. It does not work that way; most of us have tried. Not understanding that your perspective clouds your judgement juxtaposed to our own. You fail to grasp that our walls exist for reasons you may never have had to consider; some of us have lived in survival mode for so long that we couldn’t begin to explain why solitude hurts less than any attempt at masking in your presence. We see the effect it has on you, see you shift under the weight of our baggage or waiver at the first sign of a storm. Even if you don’t mind, it’s more than we can bear most of the time.
You tell us we matter and have such a big heart, that it’s a good thing and that there should be more of us. And we appreciate you. We do; we hear the love you are screaming from the mountain, but we are in the valley below, and you are nearing the peak. You’ve been fortunate enough to acquire seemingly well-constructed safety nets that have prevented you from ever having to survive the wilderness below. We choose solitude because predators on the prowl want to make prey of us. After all, you probably wouldn’t believe us anyway. No one wants to acknowledge that they know someone capable of unspeakable atrocities — sadly, it’s always someone we know. Someone you know.
Many people who have tried to mould us through their guidance have never experienced what we have, yet they possess the audacity to claim comprehension.

[That’s your ego.]
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However, something is to be said for a life forged in hellfire and solitude. Born into a darkness, you cannot conceive. If anything, we envy you that. We were created to withstand the unfathomable, though we do not know why we were ‘chosen’. What did we do to deserve being born into a world that pretends to care and understand, all while serving underhanded support and flattery on a painted tin platter and calling it gold?
And when we decide that we are done and make unthinkable choices, your end of the cycle repeats. Except for this time, you pity yourself; ask how you didn’t see it and wonder what could ever have been so bad. But you don’t listen when we speak, and you don’t dig into the meaning of the words; you don’t bother to understand the behaviours. As teens, we’re brushed off as attention seeking; as adults, we’re viewed as entitled hypochondriacs. Either way, we’re pitied but not helped — rarely understood, rarer still, accepted.
By the time we are comfortable enough to talk about living in the grey, you think we are new to it all; we aren’t. We’ve learned reality the hard way, hit rock bottom, and discovered it has a basement.So, yes, we hear you, and believe it or not, we appreciate you.
Can you hear us, though? Are the words I’ve written here cutting through your veil? Can you see how your perspective was not earned like ours? We are not cut from the same cloth or even the same design.

I understand it, though; indeed, I do — most everything I have said here today, you can, too. It’s hard to hear, but don’t miss the point because your pride can’t take a hit — accept your advice, and let yourself open up a bit.

You’ll be fine, it only hurts for a minute; it could be so much worse…


Thanks for reading!