I’ve been thinking about toxic positivity for years now. For me, it was highlighted in my yoga practice. Teachers would come beaming into the classroom chanting and singing with their harmoniums, telling the class to take deep breaths in and then to “let it go.” I would go along with it, hoping that I would attain that easy-going, conflict-avoidant personality that could simply “let things go,” but my ruminating mind that actually gets paid to judge and assess people to certain standards could never “let it go.”
Over the last two years, I have never thought more about quitting my job. The pandemic changed society overnight. Grace and patience were offered to so many industries that made the adjustment. As we have readjusted, that same grace and patience do not exist in practice. They do exist in messaging though. “You’re doing great,” “This is hard for so many people,” etc. Part of my desire to quit is rooted in the cognitive dissonance I feel on a day-to-day basis. I’m struggling. I feel like a first-year teacher and I’ve been teaching for twelve years. I can’t keep up with my workload or prep fast enough or grade quick enough to then prep fast enough to bridge the learning gap that the media harped on for a year. No support team is big enough to also tend to the socio-emotional devastation and repair that students need as they have been thrust back into the classroom and into social situations that they did not experience for a year. As I am struggling with teaching, I cannot imagine students’ shock that they must have felt when they returned to school that was unchanged by the pandemic even though their day-to-day realities had been altered by it, ultimately altering them. We’re all struggling. But then, we’re all told how great we are and how good we’re doing. At times, I feel like it is toxic positivity, cheerleading that gaslights us into a “don’t focus on the bad parts” mentality.
Beyond toxic positivity, I’m concerned that this is also growing and mutating into a toxic empathy. Every year, I ask students to read an excerpt from “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. The Existentialist lens offers a wide scope to analyze literature. I returned to it this last week to not only teach it, but also use it when debriefing a poor sub report I received. I told my students that we’re all pushing our boulder up a hill and sometimes we make it visible and other times we don’t. I just wanted the students to be nicer to the sub and to consider ways that they could make other peoples’ live easier.
But that’s also all some students do: make themselves small to accommodate the robust emotions and lives of others. Today, half of my senior class was absent on a field trip. Our class turned into a conversation, as the class often does under these conditions (it’s the part I missed most while teaching on Zoom, tbh). I tried to redirect students back to making up their late work and utilizing the classtime that they were given to be productive. A student pushed back: “Ms. Vaughan, you’re the only adult that I can really talk to. My dad don’t listen to me. He’s always on me.”
I asked more, “What does your dad get on you about?”
“As soon as I walk in the door, he’s on me about so many things. I don’t know where to start…Sometimes I just want to be like, ‘Damn, dad, I just want a hug.’”
I smiled and laughed a little bit at this.
“Nah, you know I’m hella sensitive, Ms. Vaughan. And then he gets on me about ‘Back in my day…’ and I get that, but that shit didn’t work, so I wanna do it different now. But he won’t listen to me.”
“But have you ever tried to tell your dad that?”
“Nah, I can’t tell him that. I know he only be acting that way because he really just wants a hug, but can’t express that. So then I feel bad for him because he’s just treating me like he was treated.”
This student showed so much empathy for his father’s parenting style; for a student to see his father as an emotionally underserved child now in adult form is sure as hell way more empathy than I could have mustered at 17. It broke my heart a little bit to witness this student suffer because he knows and understands the emotional boulder that his dad is pushing up the hill or carrying with him. He sacrifices his comfort to accommodate the weight for his father.
I thought about it during my walk to the train station and the whole train ride home. I still don’t really know what to think about it. It feels like toxic empathy is pervading work and small community cultures that have been steeped in toxic positivity. Both used to avoid honest, transparent communication. For years, we’ve asked students to develop their empathy, but what happens when they hear the message and we don’t? When they’re empathetic to us but we’re not empathetic to them?
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