It’s Okay To Feel Defeated Even If Everyone’s Telling You To ‘Stay Positive’

Here is a groundbreaking truth: Telling someone to stay positive does not magically fix everything.

Telling someone to look on the bright-side will not repair the trauma and distress they might be experiencing.

And telling someone to just get over it will absolutely not make him or her get over it, despite your conviction.

It is beautiful and perfectly right to be optimistic and bright spirited—in fact, it is essential for living a life full of peace and happiness. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we will still go through times that will leave us exasperated and times that will make us feel scared and uncertain and afraid.

Life is full of moments we can never quite expect.

I used to believe that maybe bad things happen in threes, as if I could predict these events by the count of my fingers. But that’s not true. Bad things will happen in twos, or in tens, or won’t happen until after a 3-month streak where suddenly you get hit with something crappy again and again.

We can learn to control our negative emotions and not let them blow up in rage, but we can’t wish them out of existence. We can’t scrap them from our emotional pallet. Because the negative emotions are part of what make us human.

Our lives are going to forever be a balance of ups and downs, never perfectly up nor down for any period of time. And we should be allowed to feel in response to those events.

We should be allowed to feel, because like many things in life, we need to release. Like a cloud full of water, you deserve to let those feelings out. Like a wave energizing in the ocean, crashing is a way to rebuild momentum.

You should never feel embarrassed or ashamed to react and have emotion. You should never feel like you must have a timeline on feeling upset. You should never repress your sadness just because someone told you, “You need to remain positive”.

Over time, you will learn that healthy balance. And that balance will allow you to recover from the falls and climb yourself out of a rut. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t have them.

Being positive will always have its impactful place, but so will being real, human, and vulnerable. So go ahead and feel. You are only human.