live laugh love it out

let's try this toxic positivity thing, shall we?

There’s a gourmet chocolate boutique a few blocks down my street. When I first walked past it, I let myself stare at the glass counter voyeuristically, observing the artisanal chocolates through the window as if they’re Fabergé eggs. Gentrification glory — when you see a tiny piece of candy go for $5, prepare for your rent to go up next year. But on this particularly cold November afternoon, I find myself unable to ignore it. Not surprising: I always feel like I’m just one purchase, one kiss, or one sweet treat away from unlocking the meaning of the universe and forever absolving myself of human suffering.

The lady at the counter politely lets me take my time as my decision paralysis kicks in and I can’t seem to pick the perfect flavor assortment to take home. There it goes again, a wave of anxiety over something so trivial. The illusion of choice is tactful but loud, as if choosing between hazelnut and pecan is going to change my life in any meaningful way. And no, this isn’t an election metaphor, but I did want you to notice.

“I can’t decide, would you recommend something?”

“Hm. They're all nice. Have you tried our hot chocolate?”

“You guys do hot chocolate too?” I lower my voice so my childlike excitement doesn’t get in the way. Hot chocolate? What am I, five? Actually, that sounds like divine intervention. The lady could be a psychic in disguise, sensing that disgusting cloud of seasonal affective disorder radiating from me. She’s totally onto something.

I get a large hot chocolate with whole milk and whip because I’m classy like that. If I’m gonna do hot chocolate, I’m not doing skim or almond milk nonsense, sorry. That’d be a disgrace to both joy and chocolate. And so I walk out, phone in one hand, a steaming hot cup in the other. One hearty gulp burns my tongue and then my throat but I can’t afford to wait: I’m starving for some spiritual epiphany in a to-go cup. The paper cup, ironically, spells out “All you need is love” in true suburban wine mom fashion. It’s, like, begging to save me or something. Well, it’s succeeding: the chocolate is heavenly, rich and silky, high quality, and well worth the double digits I’d just paid — gentrification may be a bitch, but she also made some points. Meaning, however, has not been located, and be damned my constitution for needing to find meaning in every scenario. There is none: it’s just a great thing to have something warm and sweet and high in fat on a cold gloomy day. I didn’t invent this, people have been doing this forever, and for a good reason. Is this what my therapist meant by telling me to slow down? The standards I’ve set for myself are so paralyzingly high I’ve become handicapped — I can no longer locate joy in the mundane. But for a split second, all the sugar and warmth wrap me up in a blanket that’s as ancestral as it is divine, and I forget why I’m in therapy at all. I’m literally the girl who is “going to be okay.” I guess that’s what it feels like to just be.

***

I won’t go into too much detail, but I had to call the hotline recently. No, I wasn’t a danger to myself or others —too selfish for the former and clumsy for the latter— but I know myself well enough to predict that whenever I get like this, I resort to irrational self-sabotage like eradicating the most important people in my life, cutting all my hair off, or moving countries on a whim (true story x4). None of these options have ever served me beyond temporary relief. It was one of those days where you find yourself delirious and hyperactive, fever motion, hated by everyone and hating everyone back, fidgeting around your house like a tennis ball, a little nauseous and eager to bury yourself alive under the floorboards. Just girly things, you know. What do you do? Go for a run? Take a nap? Well, if that were the case, Better Help and its counterparts would have filed for bankruptcy long ago. Instead, you end up doomscrolling, ignoring your hunger and thirst, writing self-effacing footnotes into the story of your life. Made my bed, and now, unfortunately, I have to lie in it, though I may need a little Ambien for this. But since my frontal lobe is fully developed, this time, I counterattack with a 1-800-fix my brain for me, please.

Hello? I’d like to speak to somebody. It’s pretty urgent.

I’m in the Netherlands, where big pharma thrives and proper healthcare is seen as a nice-to-have or an afterthought, not a basic human right. You shall surrender to the fate of dealing with mental health deniers in the process of getting help, to a degree at which you start questioning whether you even need it. My doctor told me I’m healthy and cute and competent, so why am I upset? Is it all in my head, after all? In a way, I’d applaud them if I wasn’t so pissed — some biblical levels of gaslighting happening here. And with that notion, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I called. Pretty much nothing useful. Honestly, I think my urge to vent and get anonymous pity from a stranger on the phone outweighed any potential nonsense I was preparing to hear on that end of the line.

I understand your concerns. I’m so sorry to hear. You should try thinking less and being more positive, you’ll see! Have you tried going on walks? It’ll change your life!

Well, I can’t even be mad because this is exactly what I’d anticipated. Ironically, somewhere between her aloof live laugh love responses and my desire to just end the call quicker, I have a breakthrough. Believe it or not, I actually have never attempted to think less and be more positive. I’ve just always been under the assumption that cookie-cutter self-help advice doesn’t work — and when you’ve written something off as useless, you don’t reverse to questioning it. But what if it does? Hear me out. What if wine moms have been right all along? You know what they say, they booed Jesus too, didn’t they…

Radical optimism and toxic positivity are not part of my constitution. Not only because I have a fairly realistic grasp on the state of affairs in the world and find the whole ‘you create your own reality’ mindset gurus both nauseating and fraudulent, but also because I’ve got a melancholia-programmed chip implanted in my brain since birth and it’s made me incapable of faking happiness with a gun to my head. I’m not a negative or cynical person, either, and I think my friends would attest to this. But I can’t say I’m ever blindly happy or hopeful — I know better. I know that sometimes it gets so bad you have to call the hotline. I know that sometimes getting out of bed is a chore and, instead of finding silver linings, you’ll much rather sink deeper into the pit of despair, because why even bother? Then, just as you expect things to get better, you’ll get slapped with something much worse, usually unexpected, as if the whole universe has conspired against your improvement and God himself is praying on your downfall. At that point, all you can do is die or laugh about it, the choice is yours. Again, I’m selfishly immortal, so my only option is laughter. Soon enough and before you know it, it gets okay. Not back to Business As Usual okay, but okay enough to start engaging with a book or a film again and feel genuine interest awakening your body one limb at a time, or even get up and go for a walk. You’ll call your strongest friend and say something stupid and regret it later, and yet they’ll be there with you in all your prolific idiocy, holding your idiot hand because they love you too much to let you shrivel and perish like an abandoned house plant.

Our generation is positivity-averse. There are a few understandable reasons for this. Positivity in its contemporary form tends to overarchingly stem from a place of privilege, negating important factors that play a crucial role in one’s ability to feel happy; everything from one’s socioeconomic status to plain inequality and the sheer capacity for physical and mental wellbeing. Optimism has a reputation for putting a bandaid over gushing wounds, dismissing real-world problems in favor of capitalist oblivion and productivity. Barbara Held, a clinical psychologist, has critiqued positivity in psychology, noting that it “poses tyrannical expectations for happiness.” Not to mention, positivity is offered as a passive measure: why don’t you just embrace the unknown and be happy, let life flow through you? It’s a pragmatic person’s hell. Practicing positivity is an act akin to putting on a dress, bypassing the concrete steps that could genuinely improve your situation — you’re just told to cultivate goodness irrespective of circumstance and all the nuance that plays into the root cause of why you’re unwell to begin with. Our strong aversion to this lazy one-size-fits-all Be Happy mantra is not unnatural; the more uncertain and volatile the world gets, and the more tragic information from all over the world we access and process daily, the more cynical and devoid of joy we become in response; the more ridiculous optimism looks in contrast. Late millennials and Gen Z are particularly at risk due to the dissolution of our promised picture-perfect future in real time. And we can’t afford the unbearable lightness of denial, either. Let’s leave that to our parents.

Focusing on the positive is a lot of work. Most of the time, it feels like having an appointment at 2 PM. Your entire day is bound to go to waste: you can’t make any plans beforehand because you’re so focused on 2 PM approaching, mentally preparing for The Appointment, and you can’t do anything afterward either because, well, that was meant to be the pinnacle, and now it’s unwinding from The Appointment time. The whole day then becomes about the appointment, and your whole life becomes about achieving a state of positivity. Staring at the ceiling until it starts talking back to me, detached from surroundings, chanting I’m positive I’m positive I’m positive just for the comfort of distorted echo and empty promises of self-help experts.

But then, just for a moment, I think to myself — if I can’t ease my pain or the pain of others, and things are wildly out of my control, what is there left to do? Could I live laugh love not to erase the suffering, but to make the journey a little more bearable along the way? Could I hold space for both a cynical understanding of the world’s atrocities and small attempts to make myself a little happier? Or does it have to be one or the other? Could it all, for a moment, be a radical act of resistance against life’s difficulties? Let’s flip the narrative here — apologies for playing the wine mom’s advocate. And in the true defining manner of our generation, we can attempt to do all of this ironically. Ethel Cain recently brought up the irony epidemic we’ve found ourselves in, and while irony as a way of coping may not always be appropriate, its application to our personal and relational pain can help us step toward a more, pardon me, positive future. We don’t have to fully adopt the wine mom paradigm to extract the necessary wisdom from a corny wall poster. Because life, as I’ve gotten to know it, happens at the intersection of trying to feel better and just being. It’s both and it’s neither. It doesn’t care if I’m happy or miserable, ironic or genuine, miserably happy or happily miserable. It’s just there, raw and ugly and messy as it comes — it’s my job to mold it into something I can tolerate. My chemical imbalance can come along for the ride, we’re inclusive here. And hey, I’m not selling you life coaching services or promoting some diligently premediated eerily far-right 12 rules for life mindset shifts, I’m just throwing a little suggestion out there. Can we try to be a little… happier? Even when the reasons are very few? Wow. I can’t believe I just cured depression. Big pharma should be terrified of me. You’re welcome.

I’m half-joking, of course. Truth is, nothing is ever easy or devoid of suffering. There’s always more pain to feel and more dishes to do and more things piling up to discover and untangle about yourself and others in the process. I can sit here all day wishing for eternal happiness, no bad hair days, world peace, and bulletproof optimism. Or I can suck it up and go for a walk, as suggested by the hotline lady. And I don’t mean that dismissively — I say that with love, compassion, and consideration. Who knows what tomorrow holds? You may meet the love of your life, or a friend suddenly needs you, or you’ll find yourself with a cup of overpriced hot chocolate. The suffering is endless, but so are the possibilities. And we’ll live, and we’ll laugh, and we’ll love. And we’re going to be okay, too.