Rachel: Hey, writers. Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast who will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
Emily: And today we want to talk about top toxic positivity, because Rachel is up in arms about it.
Rachel: Very upset about toxic positivity. Yeah. This is an idea that I wanted to talk about with you because I got a DM in my Instagram DMs a couple of weeks ago where a writer had asked me, how do I stay positive in my writing life? And I think that is a valid and common question. Yeah. I think there is a belief that one must always be positive.
Emily: The highest state of being or something.
Rachel: Exactly, yes. And that you let nothing affect you, and that is what equals a healthy mindset. So I could tell that this question that the writer was asking me, the root of it was, I want a healthy mindset, but she had equated it to how do I stay positive all the time? Those are two different things.
Emily: Yeah. There's a difference between how do I always be positive? And writing is terrible right now. How do I have more fun? How is it more enjoyable? How do I find my love for it? Again? Like, that's a very different approach.
Rachel: And this isn't just like, the reason that I feel probably really strongly about toxic positivity is because it's not just a writing thing. This is a life thing. People have this same viewpoint about life in general. You have to be positive. You must bury down your negative emotions, and you'll see it on social media where people will be like, positive vibes only, and then throw up, like, the peace signs, like, positive vibes only. Like, this is no negative vibes in my life. And then you're left being like, okay, but actually, I do feel negative vibes. So does that mean that I'm bad or I that shame story?
Emily: Yeah, I see where we're going.
Rachel: Yeah.
Emily: The shaming of this is really hard for me right now. I'm not enjoying this right now. My story is making me grumpy. I can't look at the page and equating that to, well, I'm failing and keeping my positivity mindset, and so therefore, I'm ashamed of myself for not being able to have a positive writing life.
Rachel: Yes, I'm feeling it.
Emily: I'm up in arms with you.
Rachel: Right. So when you think about it, you're like, okay, what this question really stems from is a shaming of negative emotions, and that is harmful. We all experience negative emotions. That is a normal part of the human experiences. And this has been a big learning in my own life over the past couple of years, is that you cannot bury them and expect them to go away. It just makes them worse. So it's like whenever I see people do positive eyes only throughout the peace sign, I look at them, and I'm like, that I was you three years ago and deeply unhappy, but I had no idea how to come to terms with that.
Emily: Well, you bury it. I shame myself. I feel like people have different approaches. And so mine was always if writing was going badly or I wasn't enjoying it or if it was really hard and I was struggling with that, then my negative voices would turn on me and I would shame myself into, okay, well, you have to hustle more, you have to be more positive. You have to find ways to and I think that can lead to reaching out. How do I be more positive? How do I avoid this more? Because you feel like you'll have to. For me, it would be like A, controlling of those negative emotions and controlling through shaming. Yeah.
Rachel: I think so many people experience this and then they equate those negative inner critic voices or this negative self talk or whatever it is to the unhealthy mindset that's holding them back. And I think it's the opposite. I think that in writing and in life things are hard that is okay. We need to be really careful about shaming that because it is negating our own human experience. And at the same time, it's a spiral. I just feel like we're spiraling deeper and deeper down this hole while trying to claw for the light. And you can't get out of the hole that way.
Emily: Yeah. That's so fascinating. I took a shame clinic course with Simone Sol and David Bedrick. I think it's just the last thing and a lot of the unshaming lessons that they taught had to do with looking at the thing you're shaming and asking yourself like, what can you learn from that? And I think there's something so powerful in a taking away the end goal of like, I want my writing life to always be positive because it just isn't going to be. Writing is really hard. It's really vulnerable. Emotions are going to come up. You're going to explore things that are difficult. It's going to be hard to put a raw draft on the page like all those things, right? And so A, taking away that expectation that any of that is bad, but then I think B, I want to invite you, the royal you, everyone who's talking with this, to look at the negative emotions, look at what is going on and ask yourself what you can learn from it. Because I think there's something to be like if we bury it or if we shame it, we don't have an opportunity to look at, oh, okay. I'm having a really hard time writing right now because I am afraid to face my story point.
Rachel: Right.
Emily: Or I am afraid to admit that my character's internal obstacle is something very personal to me. Or I'm afraid to admit that I'm avoiding the page because I don't want to finish my draft, because I'm really scared of the feedback that I'm going to get. Right. Because if we just focus on, oh, you're just not showing up to the page and you feel like crap every time you sit down, then you're not going to get anywhere. You're not getting to the root of what's going on with you. So anyway, that's my shame. So box.
Rachel: Yeah. That is, I think, very close to what Healthy Mindset looks like because Healthy Mindset doesn't ignore the pain. Healthy Mindset approaches the pain and questions where this is coming from. The negativity in air quotes and saying like, I'm experiencing this for a reason. What is that reason? What do I do about it? Versus just saying like invalidating your own experience and saying, well, this negative emotion is just negative because I'm a negative person. And so in order to be a more positive person, I need to not think negative things. And so I'm going to think more positively and so therefore all my problems will be solved. That is like if we're thinking of like a spectrum here, a sliding scale that's not solving anything. It's not self love. Exactly.
Emily: Self degradation.
Rachel: Yeah.
Emily: Is that the word? Self degradation? It's self shaming. It's saying like what I am now and what I'm feeling right now is wrong. And so I'm going to do something else. I'm going to fix it, I'm going to bury it, whatever it is, I'm going to shame it into not existing versus like, I love myself, I'm going through this thing. Where is it coming from?
Rachel: Yeah. And sometimes this has been a learning of, I think, becoming more mature. This is maybe going more towards life things. Life is just hard sometimes and sometimes you can't fix it and sometimes you just have to embrace that it's difficulty and accept it as part of the human experience. And do I absolutely agree with you that I think that we can follow these inner critic voices to get to the root of an issue and face them head on. And sometimes what that results as is like this is just hard, that's okay. And what I can do about it is just accept that I feel this way.
Emily: And love yourself through it.
Rachel: And love yourself through it. Exactly. Because you don't have to be positive all the time to be a great writer or to be a great person. And maybe this is a popular opinion, but I think are negative. Again, negative and air quotes because I don't want to attach a value to that feeling. But those more difficult emotions are what give us the humanity that brings depth and value to our stories. Right.
Emily: So good.
Rachel: And we run away from them.
Emily: Yeah.
Rachel: We're missing we're cutting out a deeply meaningful part of ourselves, of our hearts, and we're leaving that at the door and we're not allowing that to come into our writing. And that's where writing words, stories, connect with people, is when they tackle these really difficult feelings, make you face them. That's why a reader picks up and enjoys a book and they want to see that struggle and change and growth to become a better person. But if you're turning away your own negative experiences and saying, I don't want them, I want to be positive all the time, you're going to miss out on bringing that depth to your page.
Emily: Yeah. I can 100% definitively say that working on my own mindset and learning to love myself for all of the various parts of my humanity has opened me up to being able to see and understand and love my characters in a way that I couldn't before. Because when you're shaming yourself, you're also probably shaming your characters in ways that you don't see and that is turning off a piece of their humanity that's going to connect to other people and we can go into that, take a different time. But I just want to say, as writers, this work is really important for us and for our stories. I think that's a really good point.
Rachel: Yeah. I love Brene brown. I love Brene Brown's work on shame and vulnerability and empathy. And she has a if you look it up on YouTube, there's like a little short. If you hear me typing in my computer, I want to set, like, the name for you. But if you look up empathy, Renee Brown, there's a little short. It's got 19 million views. I highly encourage you to watch it. And it talks about how we have a tendency to do what she calls silver lining. It where we do this to ourselves at the same time that we do this to other people. You share or you experience something bad and then we do a but it could be worse. But thank goodness that you at least have this come out of it. You add the silver lining to this bad situation. And once I watch this video, I try very consciously not to do this because it drives disconnection. And this is talking about inter people relationships, but I also think it drives disconnection on your page and with yourself, where you experience something hard and you say, well, at least my character yeah, at least it wasn't worse. At least I finished a draft. At least something else. That silver lining attitude feeds this, you must be positive all the time when really what you just need to say is like, that was hard.
Emily: Yeah.
Rachel: Maybe I need a friend to go through this with that's okay. And I'm just reminded of the first time that I not only felt this for myself, but I tried not to silver lining it for myself. It just felt so much like a relief, like I didn't have to make up a reason to be happy. You could just be yeah.
Emily: You can just feel what you're feeling.
Rachel: You can just feel what you're feeling. So, yeah, I want to share that with you because I love Bernie Brown, so go check out all her work on shame and vulnerability and empathy. But treat yourself the same way that that video will treat you to teach others. And I think you'll move away from this toxic positivity compulsion. I really think that in a lot of people, it's a compulsion because I do think that this is ingrained in us. And I'll give you one example. You're sitting at the dinner table and you're full and you don't want to eat any more food, and you hear, but there are starving children in Africa, aka, but you could have it worse. So then you think, okay, I can't have negative things because I could have it worse. There's all of this ingrained beliefs that we have growing up, and I could be overreaching. So if this is not your experience, I totally respect that. So much of my experience is like, well, you could have had it a lot worse, or you could be this, or this could be happening to you in these other areas. And so you do have to still relining it. You have to amp yourself back up, and you don't have to do that.
Emily: Yeah, I think it turns out differently for everyone, but it's always there. For me, it was if I was experienced negative emotions, I would be the drama queen. Yeah, I would be called the drama, which you can see where Rachel's Burying comes from, and then my shaming comes from, because no one wants to be called a drama queen and have your feelings negated. And so that's where the shaming I started self shaming instead, like, oh, well, you're having negative emotions. You're just being dramatic.
Rachel: You're just being dramatic.
Emily: Just go fix it. Doesn't work like that. So it could be different for you. But I'm sure I think toxic positivity is rooted in hospital culture, because if we're positive, we're more productive. We will not go down that road on this podcast, but we will. But it's likely that you have experienced toxic positivity in some way and been taught it in some way. So encourage you to go think about that. Give it a thank, inspect it.
Rachel: Inspect that. And the next time you think like, I wish I was more positive in my writing life, well, it does not start with shaming your negative thoughts. It starts with getting to the root of them. So if you want to have a healthier, and I'm very reluctant to say more positive mindset, I will just keep it as a healthier mindset. Don't reject these emotions. Don't shame them. Live them, experience them and introspect them.
Emily: And get yourself through them.
Rachel: Love yourself through them. And I promise you that it may be difficult for a little bit. It may get you to feel maybe a little more negative in air quotes as you uncover the root of where these are coming from. But I can promise you, when you get out on the other side, your mindset will be healthier and you will feel less clouded in these areas where you question whether your negativity is valid.
Emily: Love it. Thanks for bringing that.
Rachel: Awesome. Yes. Love it. Okay, so if you want to build a successful, fulfilling and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the magic of character arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.
Rachel: Link in the show notes. We'll see you there. Thanks.
