This is a Rant Against Toxic Positivity by Neha Bhattacharya

Hey there! My name's Neha Bhattacharya. I am a grad student at UBC, and this post is a rant against toxic positivity in the popular culture and university spaces. 

I have been in university spaces for 6+ years now, both in India and in Canada, and amidst so many differences between the two— there is one thing that is strikingly consistent in both. Both the spaces, otherwise starkly different from each other, are similar in the way they stress on toxic positivity among its youth. This tells us a lot about the lopsidedness of global popular culture that increasingly stresses on being hyper-active and consistently happy in order to be accepted as a functional youth in the society. 

This blog post is an appeal or an imploration (for want of a politer word) to all who think to be hyper-active and always happy is the only acceptable state to be in. Glorification of  hyper-activity in the popular domain is highly problematic, for it encourages people to only let on what is publicly validated. The problem with the popular culture is that it puts every emotion in a spectrum and selectively addresses the two extremes only. It creates a social narrative that publicly shuns people for being and feeling less than the top of the world. As long as you are hiking, biking, dancing, partying, clubbing—you are considered a functional youth enjoying your life to the fullest. You are considered a functioning individual only as long as you are absurdly exhilarated all the time. Additionally, you can be sad only if you are grieving for it is the only type of sadness perfectly capable of feeding into the romantic ideas of the society. This botched up popular narrative glorifies emotional repression and emphasises on dizzying hyperactivity and arbitrary physical movement rather than a holistic physical and emotional development. Sadly, it misses out on all the other myriad emotions that together make us human. 

The university space gives ample scope to movement and growth, but it is also notorious for how emotionally overwhelming it can get. Not enough is said about how much more accessible and emotionally inclusive the university space needs to be. As a part of a hyperactive space, we often miss out on the fact that a mellow but constant sense of sadness is as emotionally and physically draining as the sharp stabs of grief. Melancholia is an incorrigible sadness that makes you feel you are anchored underwater. It overwhelms your senses and emotional capacities and leaves you feeling stifled and gasping for breath. In university spaces, melancholy can be especially crippling. Interesting enough, the same thing is true for the constant urge to project how happy we are to the world. We need to understand that happiness is an emotion, not a state of being. In the constant need to project a happy exterior, we as the consumers of popular youth culture, become emotionally repressed (constipated might be a more visually persuasive term) which ultimately leads to a community less equipped to deal with other frictions. The society, with its efforts to carefully cultivate (or engineer) and regulate its youth’s emotions, ultimately curates for itself a group of emotionally stunted people incapable of making the world a better place to live in.

What do we do, then, you ask? Well, for starters: it's time to change the narrative. It is time we, as a community, address every single emotion on that goddamn spectrum and simply own up to it. The university space needs to update itself in order to be more emotionally inclusive. It needs to be conducive to cathartic expressions of emotions that help make its youth feel a little less underwater. In addition to that, the popular narrative needs to be steered towards encouraging emotional availability. Conversations around mental health are superficial unless we actually and intrinsically want to change our attitudes and accept emotional vulnerability as a community. We can get the ball rolling, truly, only the day we accept that it is absolutely okay to not be okay. The day we as a community start accommodating and normalising every kind of emotion as a natural process—is the day we can genuinely start evolving as a society towards a brighter future.