Stop pretending that life is a walk in the park.

Because even a walk in the park can be something treacherous. The weather gets cold. Sometimes it snows and everyone is telling you how beautiful it is to watch the flurries but you can’t see it the way they do. They are looking at it from the windows in their luxuriously heated houses but you, you’re not looking at the beauty, you’re feeling every part of it because you’re stuck in this uncomfortably small snow globe made of thick enough glass where it seems pointless to try to break through it, but still thin enough to be smashed into pieces by clumsy hands who do not understand fragility. And inside of this snow globe you’re feeling all alone, making a journey that you don’t feel has a purpose. You lose feeling in all your toes, still continuing to walk on the feet you begin to forget you have, unable to focus on that which is more than one step ahead of you because you’re not entirely sure that you’ll make it that far. You’ve already been walking so long! Your legs are getting tingly and your face is a shade of red that you didn’t know existed, a red that stands out more than the flaws your anxiety is constantly reminding you of. But you continue to walk because you know that’s what’s expected of you.

And I wonder a lot of the time if this is what everyone thinks. Do we all just have the innate need to please everyone else? To never question what we are venturing towards? To merely walk towards what we think is the right direction until our legs give out? There’s a lot of people who walk with their heads high and they seem to have it figured out. The ones who everyone follows, the ones who are a few steps ahead. But I question if they are just wandering. Or better, I wonder if they simply have very strong legs and no mind to guide them.

There are a select few who really do think they have everything figured out, though. They try to shepherd everyone along, acting as tour guides and throwing in their own advice about how to get to their point of enlightenment and knowledge of the right path to take because they read some self-help book a few years back and now think that they’re experts on the human mind. The select few who think they know how to self-help those who are not the self and remind you that your depression is “all in your head” and should have been overcome long ago. The ones who assume that their solution is yours. And maybe some of them really are enlightened, or at least more so than the rest of us. But that does not mean they can lecture me on how my sadness isn’t worthy of feeling.

That’s where my problem lies. The positivity movement is a great one, and one that I am definitely a part of because I, too, read self-help books and watched all the youtubers and documentaries that taught me how to --at the very least-- tolerate myself. But the one thing I never learned on my quest to finding happiness is that sadness doesn’t just disappear. Being happy doesn’t cure mental illness. The positivity movement focuses so much on creating happiness and self-love that it discredits and ignores other emotions. The movement completely forgets to remind everyone that it’s okay not to be happy all the time. Sadness is normal. You are not failing at happiness because it doesn’t come naturally. So as a member of the positivity movement I want to say that this isn’t just about being happy, it’s about growing. It’s about being able to appreciate, understand, and cope with all of your emotions. Even the bad ones.