Funny that I was so excited to come across the term “Toxic positivity”. It was something that was so prevalent for so long and I found so incredibly frustrating. Toxic positivity in my view is when people are basically saying “turn that frown upside down”. Life is not always sunshine and roses and this is something that we all need to acknowledge as we all experience it. But when we are in a tough spot or life isn’t going well and we try to talk to someone about it and they tell us that we shouldn’t focus on the negative or “don’t worry things will get better” or “at least _____________ hasn’t happened” it is extremely invalidating. I’m not sure when it became trendy to only speak of happy things but this is not real life. We still seem to have this idea in our society that happiness is a state that you attain and retain. This simply isn’t true. Life is full of ups and downs, happiness and sadness, joyful times and painful times. When we stop allowing space for pain we stop allowing people to process and grow. So while it isn’t healthy to focus only on the negative all the time it is equally unhealthy to pretend with people you love and trust that everything is okay when it isn’t. So please, let’s all try to make room for the people we care about to talk about the things they care about and not shut them down when it isn’t all sunshine and roses.