Toxic Positivity

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It seems strange to refer to POSITIVITY as toxic , but yes, even positivity can be toxic. Seeing as I posted about toxic negativity yesterday, this feels like a fitting sequel. Just as my dad was negative, my mom is positive. She is the polar opposite of where he was at. And as good as that sounds, and for the most part is, it, too has it downfalls. Some cases in point. Quite some time ago, I was keeping my mom filled in about a potential beaux. This man and I had quite a friendship. We would talk on the phone for hours at a stretch. He would tell me how much he enjoyed me and how we were soulmates. He would talk about the fun plans he had for us, when he had enough time to devote to me. Well, gradually the phone calls got shorter and shorter, too. And then he had the nerve to tell me about spending a lot of time together with another woman. Someone he found "cute". Someone who would come over and stay overnights drunk. I tried telling my mom about this. And she would insist that it was me, being impatient. He was in love with me, after all - didn't he say all those nice things? Well, you can guess how that ended. Yeah - my potential beaux was romantically involved with "cute chick". Even bigger and more important case in point : Mom , due to chemo and kidney issues will get kidney infections. These are treatable, but are potentially life threatening if left. Well for about a week I knew something wasn't right with mom. I don't want to press her to feel better and I know there are days she won't feel good because of the chemo. But when she couldn't eat solid foods for days on end and was getting weaker, and more tired ... I brought it up to her and she would fight with me. She'd tell me she was fine and this was normal because she's on chemo, and she'd say how I was stressing her out and to just leave her alone. And I would plead that something major wasn't right... and she'd fight me even harder. Finally I just grabbed the forehead thermometer and took her temp. Yup. I was right. 103F fever. We're going in. She's been in the hospital 5 days now. So yes, sometimes, even if we have a positive outlook, - sometimes things are negatives and we can't just close our eyes and say it's too stressful. Sometimes we need to take actions to correct the positives. I think it's probably healthy to be mostly positive, with a touch of "realism" Photo: made with the DAWN AI App