Cult of positivity

There is something that has been weighing on me for a couple of months, and I've tried to handle it with the occasional pointed comment or snarky aside, but that's just not getting the job done, so it's time for an angry rant (lots of profanity here, folks, so go ahead and clutch your pearls now and get it out of the way).

Round about October every year, I see people who are excited to see Christmas decorations come out early, and I see people who bitch about Christmas decorations being out "too early," and I see LOTS of  "awww, let people enjoy things!" posts.

But I almost never see "let people be sad" posts. No, instead I see all the armchair life coaches spewing their usual bullshit:

• "You just need to find the lesson in the experience..." Shut up.
• "It's all about your mindset!" Shut. Up.
• "Every cloud has a silver lining..." SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

The relentless pressure to put a happy fucking spin on everything is NOT out of concern for those of us who are struggling; it's about people's unwillingness to deal with the discomfort of dealing with people who are in pain.

Listen, assholes: some things just fucking suck. How, exactly, am I to find a silver lining in the fact that my husband died, hmmm? How to find a "lesson" in the fact that, less than two months from now will be the first anniversary of his death? How to put a good "mindset" on the fact that I'll have to deal with that anniversary every fucking year that I live, when we never got to celebrate a single anniversary of our marriage?

And how can ANYONE who lost someone close during 2020 - the year when we couldn't even get the support that we needed due to a fucking pandemic - how can ANYONE in that position be ANYTHING but broken and lost and sad and angry? And now you're gonna make us feel worse than we already do because we can't find a way to be happy despite our lives being destroyed? Like there's something wrong with us for mourning what we've lost instead of being grateful for what we had? Here's a news flash for you: being grateful for what we had? THAT DOESN'T FUCKING TAKE AWAY THE SADNESS FOR WHAT WE LOST. Read that again. And again. And again and again and again if necessary, until you fucking understand it.

For fuck's sake, if you can't deal with people being sad/angry over the shit year that just transpired, maybe it's YOU who needs to take a fucking look in the mirror, count YOUR blessings that you aren't in our shoes, and then SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Let people feel how they feel. Maybe YOU oughtta cope with your unwillingness to face the reality that some things are just objectively awful and cannot be spun into fucking gold.

Maybe the power of positivity is effective for some situations, but when you're dealing with people whose lives were completely torn to shreds - whether through death, or illness, or losing their job or their home - it's not only ineffective, it's fucking insulting. It's an insinuation that losing the love of one's life is somehow emotionally equivalent to your car breaking down. 

I can't "positive think" my way out of the loneliness of missing my husband, because no amount of positive thinking is going to make him alive again. And no friendship can stem that loneliness, because it's loneliness for a kind of intimacy that can't be had any other way. 

Let people feel how they feel. Period.