Give me a smile, girl
Make my head twirl, girl,
I don’t have all day.
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“Be positive!”
“It’ll all be okay. Just grin and stick with it.”
The happy-face façade. I don’t think we talk about it as much as we should. What even is it? And if it’s about positivity and a sunny outlook on life, why is it a problem?
It’s a problem because:
- It is based on denial. It’s a philosophy that involves invalidating your own thoughts and emotions.
- It essentially claims that being sad or angry or negative in any way is bad.
Human emotion is so vast in its range, and yet so many of these emotions fall on the negative side of the spectrum—anger, jealousy, grief, contempt, disgust, sadness, loneliness, fear. Am I saying essentially that they are evolutionarily useful? Yeah. Yeah, I am. They help us to know when we’ve been wronged, they alert us to injustice either against ourselves or others, and they help us to know when to run the heck away or stop engaging with a potential serial killer. If you think about it, being positive and optimistic in some scenarios could cost you more than just emotional detachment.
Let me paint you a scenario (don’t worry, I have a point).
On a blue-skied September afternoon, when it was still warm enough to be walking at a leisurely pace, I was heading home on Laval after a super long few days of classes, meetings, extra-curricular duties and responsibilities, and I just felt my head literally full to its brim with thoughts, nothing quite sticking in my field of focus for more than a minute. I don’t think I even focused on any one thought for 30 seconds. Internally, I was an exhausted mess, and my brow was furrowed all day. After staring at my shoes as they hit the pavement for a good 5 minutes, I happened to look up at the street corner to cross, and I noticed the 4PM sunlight streaming through the leaves, a medley of light and orange and yellow and green lush. It took little more than a sight like that to stop me in my tracks – and I did.
And there I stood, head in the clouds, my thoughts quiet, my heartbeat slowed. On a quiet residential street on a fall afternoon, I realized something big, all on my own. This is what I realized: that no matter how stressed I am, no matter how much I’ve got going on in my head, in that moment I was nothing more than a girl walking down a street, looking at the sunlight that would stream through the trees in that way no matter how many assignments I had on my plate or how scared I was about the future. I could be the happiest, most productive person in the world in that moment and still, the scene before me would look just like that.
Not a grand or rare, or even that special of a scene. But I think that’s what made it even more beautiful to me – its understatedness.
And that, dear reader, was a real moment of mindfulness: sitting in the knowledge that, regardless of how my internal world stood – or whether it stood at all – the external world goes on. We are outside observers of these trees, that sunlight.
My point is that the happy-face façade needs a re-evaluation. “Be positive” is not meant to mean “Slap on this positivity on top of your negativity because your negativity isn’t wanted here. Go be negative at home.”
Instead, know that because the world is not affected when you worry, or ruminate, or panic, there is always another way to go about interpreting it. The world is up for interpretation, just as the things that happen to you are as well.
With this in mind, I propose that instead of “being positive,” we would fare better by working through these steps:
- Label the feeling as specifically as possible. ‘Stress’ is an overarching, general term. Is it ‘frustration’, or ‘impatience’, or ‘worry’?
- Dig into why you are feeling that emotion or having that thought.
- Remember and know that you change what happens to you by the way you interpret it and not vice versa.
- Instead of being positive, think about being objective, but only after you’ve examined your emotion(s) and the reasons for them.
The best part about it is you don’t have to wear a smile if you don’t want to.
#FeelYourFeelings
Images obtained from:
All other images are author’s own