The Power of Positivity
By Kerry Forrester
This morning started off much like every other morning of late. The change of the clocks ‘falling’ backwards, has played havoc with my internal body clock.
My alarm breaks into my consciousness just as it is reaching its crescendo at 7.30am. I fumble about in the dark to locate my phone, to turn the obnoxious assault on my sleep off.
It’s too dark. I feel like I only just went to sleep. I hit the snooze button and gain ten more minutes of blissful silence. Until the alarm creeps into the threshold of my consciousness anew. We play, my alarm and I, a game of aural tennis for a couple more rounds of hit snooze and return to sleep, until the unpleasant racket can no longer be ignored.
Reluctantly and slowly sitting up in bed, I tame my birds’ nest of hair into a bobble, slip on the nearest cardigan and my slippers and stumble into the kitchen. Once there, I attend to the most important job of the day – I put water into the kettle and turn it on. I splash milk into a hastily grabbed mug and drop in a tea bag. The boiling water added to the mug is the beginning of the magical process of brewing (or in my case stewing) the British cure-all of a cup of tea.
As I imbibe the amber nectar of Yorkshire tea, I feel my sluggish senses waking up one by one. My housemate and I grunt at each other for the few minutes it takes her to inhale her breakfast and leave for work and then it’s just me (4 dogs and 4 cats) and the BBC News.
Once I’ve been sufficiently depressed by the state of the world, I make another ‘Yorkshire Stew’ and head to my bedroom.
Now, I should say at this point, that it is always my intention to go into my room to collect my towels for a shower and then go on to perform said ablution. However, what usually happens is I drink my cup of tea while sitting on my bed and then gradually start to nod off. Not because I am lazy but because the effort of waking up has already exhausted the small reserve of energy last nights sleep has given me.
So, a couple of hours later, I wake up once again (minus the irritating alarm) and I try to gather my wits (of which there are few), so that I can get up and do something with the day.
First, because I didn’t feel like it at the crack of dawn, I make myself a bowl of porridge and (yes, you guessed it) another cup of tea.
As I eat, I look at my phone properly for the first time today. There are the usual notifications: I have email. Facebook has suggested I be friends with 5 people I’ve never heard of and three people I know have posted updates. My Amazon delivery has been dispatched and my step-count for yesterday was abysmal.
Seeing that the email is non-urgent (not that I really get any that could be described as urgent these days), I tap the Facebook icon to have a quick scan to find out who had beans on toast for their tea last night and who’s child has been to A&E because they wedged the arm of a Lego man up their nose.
The first couple of posts are from authors I follow and as they both have new books out, I anticipate that my next trip will be to the Kindle Store to purchase them immediately, so that they can sit on my extensive to be read pile for a few months.
Then I scroll to see the post of a friend I’ve known for years. She’s a lovely person and along with lots of body positive messages, she often shares pictures that she likes from other accounts. Today, one of these pictures was of a ‘positive mental attitude’ list.
Now, it might just be because I seem to be having an endless flair up of my Fibro. It may even just be a fatigued ‘they mean well’ filter caused by lack of any restorative sleep. Or I might just be feeling grumpy today. But for whatever reason, this post rather than bucking me up and giving me strength, made me feel completely inadequate and more of a failure than I often feel during a flair.
Instead of the positivity that my friend thought she was passing on, this is what I got from the post:
1. I am incapable of moving forward and I feel sorry for myself instead of getting up and getting on with things like ‘normal’ ‘strong’ people do.
2. I am completely terrified by change. I am comfortable in my small world with my list of symptoms / excuses to hide behind. I would baulk at anything that challenges my safe little existence.
3. I spend my days endlessly worrying about things that are out of my control and because I expend so much energy worrying, I am not open to happiness in all its many and varied forms.
4. I am unkind, unfair and afraid to speak-up about anything.
5. I am totally risk averse. I will not try anything new.
6. I resent the success of others including those closest to me.
7. I am mentally and physically weak.
There are millions of similar ‘Positive’ posts online. No scuba kit for a deep dive necessary. They can be found in seconds. Lots of these pearls of positive wisdom have hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. That gives them a lot of power.
I’m sure that most people are unaware of the flip side of this endless positivity that spews forth from who knows where?
I have no doubt that my friend will have posted the original message with nothing but the best and kindest of intentions, without understanding that when looked at through another person’s eye, the same message can feel like a savage karate kick to the kidneys. (Or to the head for those with longer legs.)
Positivity does indeed have great power. It can give the reader strength. It can make them feel less alone. It can make them smile. Perhaps though, people need to be more conscious and aware of how and where they wield this power. Thinking about whether it is positively positive or toxic positivity before they hit the share button. (Try saying that three times!)
For those of you that are interested, I did manage to get up and get dressed in the end. But as it was Saturday, I decided a bar of chocolate, a blanket, a sofa full of dogs and a Doctor Who binge was a happy way to spend my day.