Toxic Positivity in the Creative Journey

According to the Right as Rain blog, "toxic positivity involves dismissing negative emotions and responding to distress with false reassurances rather than empathy."

Let's put it this way: It is like your cat just died and your neighbor comes to your house to tell you "Oh well, it was just a cat you know, it's not like your mother died or something like that." How would you feel hearing those words? In short, your neighbor wouldn't make you feel better about your cat's death. This would only increase the pain you are already experiencing from the loss of your furry friend. You would like to slap your neighbor in the face and send them out (well that's what I'd do). You would have all the right to feel upset.

This is an understandable situation where we can identify toxic positivity right away. But what if I tell you there is a more subtle way to sabotage our mental wellbeing, and we do it every day. In social media we are constantly bombarded by the words "Do more", "No bad days allowed" and so on. Although these are meant to be encouraging sometimes they can have the opposite effect on our creative brains.

As a storyteller myself, and I'm sure a lot of creative people here and out there, aka painters, crafters, content creators, you name them; I have observed closely the negative impact toxic positivity has on my mind. I speak for myself, I don't know if this is your case though, when I say instead of adding up to my job and feeling inspired, such words mentioned above drain all my energy. I end up in a mind numbness state where all I want to do is sit down motionless, doing nothing.

In a conversation me and my best friend, who also happens to be an artist, we were talking about how hard we could be on forcing ourselves to do something creative in order to stay regular on social media, in fear of the algorithm playing against us and eventually covering our accounts with the mantel of invisibility. And I question, does it matter that much to stay up to date? Would it matter? While some of you would agree that consistency is the key with social media, and I agree too, it is also true that in that "consistency" we could be forcing our minds to do something mechanically, something we don't want to do at the moment. And I'm going to tell you a secret: There is nothing wrong with spending time doing absolutely nothing.

In short, we don't need to force ourselves to go with the pace false social standards had created. In the end, we would be being creative to please a robot and not for ourselves.

I always say that first, I do write for myself, then I share with others. And it should be like that with everything we do. Our creativity will improve and we will in fact do more without to fulfill any expectations. We will create for the sake of just creating because that is what we want to do, for ourselves first.

So my advice is this: please listen to your mind and don't force yourself. Eventually, everything will flow and you will find motivation and inspiration again. Do not diminish your worth because all you did today was sit, breathe, eat and sleep. That is positive because at the end of the day it is what we all need in order to stay alive. Sit down with your thoughts, embrace living like a stone for a few days, don't be too hard on your mind, remember you're doing the best you can.

It is in the darkest of times when we find the inspiration and the will to create❤️.

With love, Masi