My mother is bi-polar and schizophrenic and my father was an alcoholic gambler. My mother tried to kill my sister and I on multiple occasions.
My sister, Tina, fell to her death on April 5. She fell out of the 5th floor window of her motel for the homeless in San Francisco. So many people commented or sent emails or texts to me. I will call you, how terrible. 5 people called me. My closest friends who really know me. My in laws didn’t even call me.
No one wants to talk about how angry and sad I am to lose my sister, the last person to share the same memories of my childhood. How angry I am that the window could open so that people with drug addictions and mental illness could fall 5 floors down a shaft to a concrete floor. How no one has offered to help pay to cremate her body so her only son who is in prison can keep her ashes.
This is america- where life has to be like instagram.
Great, needed essay and permit me to suggest a third book along with Susan Cain's *Bittersweet* and Whitney Goodman's Toxic Positivity: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd B. Cashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener.
When I tell people about my sister’s death by falling from the 5th floor in her building, and that I am working to get all the windows with fall protection so it doesn’t happen to someone else…they focus on the fixing the windows… not my sister’s untimely and horrid death by blunt force trauma. How terrified she must have been for the few seconds while she fell before she was crushed by speed and gravity. How badly I feel that I couldn’t protect my little sister…whom I had always protected…
No one wants to talk about pain…they refer me to EAP.
People hate to see the dark emotions of others because it threatens their ability to deny and cover up their own trauma, which is the status quo of toxic positivity.
This has got to be your BEST essay that I've read so far, or at least the one essay I can most connect with. THANK YOU!
I'm 57, and grew up with a mentally ill mother. She was schizophrenic. My older brother Bernard was and is schizophrenic. My late sister Margaret was schizophrenic. My late sister Mary, also schizophrenic. NO ONE knew what I was dealing with in high school, or later when I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now, my 50s. No one knew why I was tired all the time in high school, because my mother would keep me and my sister up all night, screaming at us at the kitchen table while we sat silent, and forced to listen because we didn't do a household chore, JUST so. No one was there when she would get in our faces, screaming at us for imagined slights. Finally at midnight or 1;00 am, we were allowed to go to bed, and then we're supposed to get up the next day, refreshed so we can hop out of bed, get to school and take on the world?!
People who don't share this reality don't understand the crushing guilt, the survivors guilt, of "why didn't I get the "family curse" so common in large Irish American families?" I'm the 7th of 9 children. Irish-American, Catholic and the mental illness goes back to County Cork, in Ireland.
This essay is so right on. I'm glad you wrote it. I just wrote a long essay I've been working on for 18 months, on a double homicide in Portland, Oregon of two young Black women in 1973, murdered by their pimp. And I worked on it really hard, and I think I did a good job, as do others. But several of the old cops from that time, they love to try and dump on me for "slandering" the good name of the police officers and detectives back then. Leaving stupid comments, trying to minimize a huge project that took me over 18 months to complete?!
Gimme a break. It was 1973, PPB was a hornets nest of corruption. Point is, some people will just never get it. They are the kinds of people I leave behind. I simply don't have time anymore to be told I'm wrong and shouldn't do something or feel something or write about something.
People who don't have family members with mental illness often just don't get it and they never will. Great essay, thank you so much.
The worst part about this is toxic positivity is deeply engraved within hour society to the point that the person that has decided to reach out to a mental Health professional is shunned and seen as week
You have become a wise human. The path you took started when you carried the burdens of your mother and other family members. You came to understand the need for at least one other person to hear you. And now you have become a person who can guide others, to open doors. In some indigenous traditions, the person who is a healer had first to be healed. In some societies, one person's disorder is a reflection of social disorder and treatment has to be for both the community and the individual. Today we practice national denial of reality: COVID is over; climate change will wait decades while we bicker about what to do; we are not on the edge of becoming a totalitarian state. And so it goes.
I can listen. I can empathize. I can feel another persons pain and it hurts. But it also spurs me into developing solutions. I suppose I do this as much for me as I do for the suffering person. The problem is, there are not always solutions beyond just listening. But there is so much pain out there, caring people are forced to limit involvement for our own survival.
Jessica, I've been following you for many years. I remember the Medium article where you declared yourself a sociopath. Your readers knew you were a woman in pain. I remember wishing I could reach into the page and tear your pain away. Perhaps to some degree we readers did by just being there to hear you. Now I wish I could just make the scars disappear.
So I listen to this former NFL GM turned gambling expert. He doesn’t gamble himself but uses his knowledge to help gamblers and other forecasters figure out how to expect a game to go. He’s also apart of a self-help team that is sport themed.
One of his mantras, which may or may not be from Vince Lombardi, is “fear does the work of reason.” Boy do we bristle at this. We want reason and other emotional logic to motivates us. Fear seems abusive and very old school – and often that mechanism has been abused to the point where we don’t want to employ it. It’s something only a movie supervillain would use.
There’s a lot about old school motivation techniques that do not work, like the my way or the highway version of fear. But maybe we need to recognize that there are different types of fear as there are different kinds of approaches and emotional responses.
We need to develop more sophisticated approaches and emotional reactions to our situations.
Magnificent article. 100% right on, nailing the inability to express dark emotions and have someone truly listen. The insanity of the last 3 years has made this blindingly obvious to me. You have expressed this far better than I ever could have. Thank you.
I have never been afraid of sharing my sadness with my mom. She has always encouraged me to let out my sadness. That's not to say nobody else in my life has ever made me feel ashamed of my sadness and anger, but it is to say that I have always known I have to let my emotions out and I am physically unable of keeping them inside, so I don't try. (I mean, if I'm in a public place where it is just not socially acceptable to meltdown, okay, but as soon as I get back to the car or to the house I will let it out. I can't not.)
And with Covid... waking up every day and engaging with reminders that other people aren't taking it seriously, that they truly believe there's nothing to fear anymore, I have been sadder more and more frequently and I have definitely talked off my mom's and my diary's and my best friend's ears a lot.
But I also don't want to stay in the sadness all day long. I want to cry it, write it, and let it out - and I also want to feel better. Even if it only makes me feel better tonight and then tomorrow I'm sad about the same thing. When I'm sad about Covid, or climate change, these sources of sadness aren't going away in just 24 hours - so I will continue being sad about them again and again multiple days, months, years - but as much as I find it important to feel sad, I also don't want to be so sad I can't function and can't do anything (which is depression).
So... I will talk to someone about it (or to my diary about it) and then after doing so I will do something else to be happy again. And repeat.
Thank you, I needed this. The aversion to platitudes always made me feel a bit of a social misfit.
I had a relatively idyllic childhood, no fears, no anxiety but for that when turning in half done homework because there were woods nearby. In my 30s mom said I lived a charmed life, she wasn't wrong. Footloose and fancy free, guided by serendipity, I lived much as I pleased, little of responsibilities. A late bloomer with regard to marriage, fatherhood, career, home ownership, I was slow growing into a person who could listen empathetically. The marriage didn't last, the son more distant than I wished. Living with a spouse now who had a dramatically different life has taught me more than the previous 5 decades. Neurodivergent, chronically ill, hypersensitive people need to be listened to, not just for their sake, as if that weren't enough, but in hearing them, trying to imagine being in their place, compassion if there is any seed of it, will burst out and change the landscape. My friends and family are all in their 60s-70s and I really don't want to dump much on them about the struggles my wife lives with, or the ever growing impending doom of society. Writing about it does help, even if no-one reads it, but I do wish those with a future here would find insight, heed warnings, act with compassion, before it's too late.
Another book in the genre: The Antidote, by Oliver Burkeman. The subtitle is "Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." The author is a journalist who surveys a number of topics.
An aspect of toxic positivity is pathological optimism which I endured in a past relationship. I wasn't permitted to express any contrary or negative thoughts, or I'd be subject to ridicule, vilification, or worse. With that type of optimism, not only are you always right but your decisions are also the best for everyone else.
I don't think I have anyone I can share this with, but I see you. Thank you.
My mother is bi-polar and schizophrenic and my father was an alcoholic gambler. My mother tried to kill my sister and I on multiple occasions.
My sister, Tina, fell to her death on April 5. She fell out of the 5th floor window of her motel for the homeless in San Francisco. So many people commented or sent emails or texts to me. I will call you, how terrible. 5 people called me. My closest friends who really know me. My in laws didn’t even call me.
No one wants to talk about how angry and sad I am to lose my sister, the last person to share the same memories of my childhood. How angry I am that the window could open so that people with drug addictions and mental illness could fall 5 floors down a shaft to a concrete floor. How no one has offered to help pay to cremate her body so her only son who is in prison can keep her ashes.
This is america- where life has to be like instagram.
Great, needed essay and permit me to suggest a third book along with Susan Cain's *Bittersweet* and Whitney Goodman's Toxic Positivity: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd B. Cashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener.
Jessica, I adore you and I see you.
When I tell people about my sister’s death by falling from the 5th floor in her building, and that I am working to get all the windows with fall protection so it doesn’t happen to someone else…they focus on the fixing the windows… not my sister’s untimely and horrid death by blunt force trauma. How terrified she must have been for the few seconds while she fell before she was crushed by speed and gravity. How badly I feel that I couldn’t protect my little sister…whom I had always protected…
No one wants to talk about pain…they refer me to EAP.
People hate to see the dark emotions of others because it threatens their ability to deny and cover up their own trauma, which is the status quo of toxic positivity.
I was half joking with a friend recently that there should be “crying cafes” where people can go and have a hard cry in a public space.
Then I realized it’s a darker joke than I initially thought.
The truth is unless something is profitized in America in 2023 it’s unacceptable or even dangerous.
It’s why our media almost never reports on the climate crisis or the billions of dollars that strangle our democracy every day.
The good news?
There’s no way this bullshit can last.
It doesn’t work.
It never works.
This has got to be your BEST essay that I've read so far, or at least the one essay I can most connect with. THANK YOU!
I'm 57, and grew up with a mentally ill mother. She was schizophrenic. My older brother Bernard was and is schizophrenic. My late sister Margaret was schizophrenic. My late sister Mary, also schizophrenic. NO ONE knew what I was dealing with in high school, or later when I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and now, my 50s. No one knew why I was tired all the time in high school, because my mother would keep me and my sister up all night, screaming at us at the kitchen table while we sat silent, and forced to listen because we didn't do a household chore, JUST so. No one was there when she would get in our faces, screaming at us for imagined slights. Finally at midnight or 1;00 am, we were allowed to go to bed, and then we're supposed to get up the next day, refreshed so we can hop out of bed, get to school and take on the world?!
People who don't share this reality don't understand the crushing guilt, the survivors guilt, of "why didn't I get the "family curse" so common in large Irish American families?" I'm the 7th of 9 children. Irish-American, Catholic and the mental illness goes back to County Cork, in Ireland.
This essay is so right on. I'm glad you wrote it. I just wrote a long essay I've been working on for 18 months, on a double homicide in Portland, Oregon of two young Black women in 1973, murdered by their pimp. And I worked on it really hard, and I think I did a good job, as do others. But several of the old cops from that time, they love to try and dump on me for "slandering" the good name of the police officers and detectives back then. Leaving stupid comments, trying to minimize a huge project that took me over 18 months to complete?!
Gimme a break. It was 1973, PPB was a hornets nest of corruption. Point is, some people will just never get it. They are the kinds of people I leave behind. I simply don't have time anymore to be told I'm wrong and shouldn't do something or feel something or write about something.
People who don't have family members with mental illness often just don't get it and they never will. Great essay, thank you so much.
The worst part about this is toxic positivity is deeply engraved within hour society to the point that the person that has decided to reach out to a mental Health professional is shunned and seen as week
You have become a wise human. The path you took started when you carried the burdens of your mother and other family members. You came to understand the need for at least one other person to hear you. And now you have become a person who can guide others, to open doors. In some indigenous traditions, the person who is a healer had first to be healed. In some societies, one person's disorder is a reflection of social disorder and treatment has to be for both the community and the individual. Today we practice national denial of reality: COVID is over; climate change will wait decades while we bicker about what to do; we are not on the edge of becoming a totalitarian state. And so it goes.
I can listen. I can empathize. I can feel another persons pain and it hurts. But it also spurs me into developing solutions. I suppose I do this as much for me as I do for the suffering person. The problem is, there are not always solutions beyond just listening. But there is so much pain out there, caring people are forced to limit involvement for our own survival.
Jessica, I've been following you for many years. I remember the Medium article where you declared yourself a sociopath. Your readers knew you were a woman in pain. I remember wishing I could reach into the page and tear your pain away. Perhaps to some degree we readers did by just being there to hear you. Now I wish I could just make the scars disappear.
So I listen to this former NFL GM turned gambling expert. He doesn’t gamble himself but uses his knowledge to help gamblers and other forecasters figure out how to expect a game to go. He’s also apart of a self-help team that is sport themed.
One of his mantras, which may or may not be from Vince Lombardi, is “fear does the work of reason.” Boy do we bristle at this. We want reason and other emotional logic to motivates us. Fear seems abusive and very old school – and often that mechanism has been abused to the point where we don’t want to employ it. It’s something only a movie supervillain would use.
There’s a lot about old school motivation techniques that do not work, like the my way or the highway version of fear. But maybe we need to recognize that there are different types of fear as there are different kinds of approaches and emotional responses.
We need to develop more sophisticated approaches and emotional reactions to our situations.
Magnificent article. 100% right on, nailing the inability to express dark emotions and have someone truly listen. The insanity of the last 3 years has made this blindingly obvious to me. You have expressed this far better than I ever could have. Thank you.
I have never been afraid of sharing my sadness with my mom. She has always encouraged me to let out my sadness. That's not to say nobody else in my life has ever made me feel ashamed of my sadness and anger, but it is to say that I have always known I have to let my emotions out and I am physically unable of keeping them inside, so I don't try. (I mean, if I'm in a public place where it is just not socially acceptable to meltdown, okay, but as soon as I get back to the car or to the house I will let it out. I can't not.)
And with Covid... waking up every day and engaging with reminders that other people aren't taking it seriously, that they truly believe there's nothing to fear anymore, I have been sadder more and more frequently and I have definitely talked off my mom's and my diary's and my best friend's ears a lot.
But I also don't want to stay in the sadness all day long. I want to cry it, write it, and let it out - and I also want to feel better. Even if it only makes me feel better tonight and then tomorrow I'm sad about the same thing. When I'm sad about Covid, or climate change, these sources of sadness aren't going away in just 24 hours - so I will continue being sad about them again and again multiple days, months, years - but as much as I find it important to feel sad, I also don't want to be so sad I can't function and can't do anything (which is depression).
So... I will talk to someone about it (or to my diary about it) and then after doing so I will do something else to be happy again. And repeat.
Thank you, I needed this. The aversion to platitudes always made me feel a bit of a social misfit.
I had a relatively idyllic childhood, no fears, no anxiety but for that when turning in half done homework because there were woods nearby. In my 30s mom said I lived a charmed life, she wasn't wrong. Footloose and fancy free, guided by serendipity, I lived much as I pleased, little of responsibilities. A late bloomer with regard to marriage, fatherhood, career, home ownership, I was slow growing into a person who could listen empathetically. The marriage didn't last, the son more distant than I wished. Living with a spouse now who had a dramatically different life has taught me more than the previous 5 decades. Neurodivergent, chronically ill, hypersensitive people need to be listened to, not just for their sake, as if that weren't enough, but in hearing them, trying to imagine being in their place, compassion if there is any seed of it, will burst out and change the landscape. My friends and family are all in their 60s-70s and I really don't want to dump much on them about the struggles my wife lives with, or the ever growing impending doom of society. Writing about it does help, even if no-one reads it, but I do wish those with a future here would find insight, heed warnings, act with compassion, before it's too late.
Great article, makes important points.
Another book in the genre: The Antidote, by Oliver Burkeman. The subtitle is "Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." The author is a journalist who surveys a number of topics.
And an article in which I felt seen:
https://psyche.co/ideas/for-nietzsche-nihilism-goes-deeper-than-life-is-pointless
Thank you for writing.
An aspect of toxic positivity is pathological optimism which I endured in a past relationship. I wasn't permitted to express any contrary or negative thoughts, or I'd be subject to ridicule, vilification, or worse. With that type of optimism, not only are you always right but your decisions are also the best for everyone else.
It didn't end well.