Being Positive, Even When the Circumstances Don’t Call for It

I’ve been told I’m a very positive person for a lot of the past several years, at work and in my personal life. This has been interesting because I don’t always feel like a positive person, and 10 years ago, I used to be a very negative person that got pretty deterred at the slightest setback.

I feel like I am always assessing downsides and risks of situations — I am now a lawyer, after all, and when I was a teacher for six years in Baltimore City, I often had to try to anticipate issues that could come up with student interactions or lessons before they actually happened. I try to anticipate legal risks before they happen and arise in litigation.

I’ve especially been complimented lately for my positive attitude, so I feel like I need to explain positivity for a bit. I learned it does not mean being relentlessly or toxically positive. I don’t think it means ignoring the challenges of situations, like when, as a teacher, a school does not have enough staff to complete a task. I learned it does not mean not feeling the trials and tribulations of daily life or much worse.

Right now, I am going through a personal setback. It’s a complicated situation and I do not want to get too into the details of it, but it’s been hard to maintain the usual level of positivity. But I turned a lot of sadness and frustration I felt about this situation into connection. I reached out to many colleagues and friends for help, and they were more than willing to help me and provide a listening ear to my frustration. I learned that many people have been through a similar experience, and it was similarly their connections that helped them move past a difficult time.

It was also a humbling experience I needed — for the past four years or so, I was going strong, largely leveling up from success to success. In that time, I realized I started to not feel like I needed the help of others to succeed and could rely on my own skillset and effort, and now, I realize I do need the assistance of others to get by. And this failure has brought me closer to support networks like my wife and family, as well as friends and colleagues I have been close with. Having that network of support, I realized, means a lot more than any given success.

Thus, it’s probably good that my identity has changed from a more negative person to a more positive person throughout the last decade, because a decade ago, I would have been very negative about this situation. My optimism is not a blind optimism, but rather a grounded optimism. I believe I will move past this — not today, maybe not next week, maybe not next month, but that I will move past it.

There are many people in my life who have had a huge impact on my outlook. Something I admired in the most positive people I know was their ability to be very positive even in the darkest of life circumstances. One friend lost a child. Another lost one of his best friends.

It’s not that they did not feel the deep pain and grief of the loss — and I knew how hard it was to have to keep on a happy face when people were around. I can’t identify what it was, but they had to find some way to keep on going.

I have been told I’ve been an optimistic person even when life circumstances were a lot worse, and I would describe my senior year of college as pretty dark. During that year, I was depressed all the time. I don’t know if I just wanted to largely shield people from that darkness at that time, but I would describe my mood as always down.

I don’t know how I maintained that outward positivity at that time, but I don’t think that mattered much. I just wanted that outward positivity to manifest more internally, because I didn’t feel that at all. I just had hope that the situation could get better.

I did not hope because I was dreaming for a better future, necessarily. I hoped just to get through the day, to be able to get to the next hour and not go crazy.

I believe in a concept called radical optimism, which I have adopted in recent years. It’s an optimism that requires radical acceptance and acknowledgement of life circumstances. I separate my day into 20–30 minute chunks and segments. Often, during tough days and circumstances, I allow myself to wallow in despair and worry for 20–30 chunks of time before moving onto next things. I allow myself to assess risks and take inventory of how messed up a situation is. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that cleanly, but the intention is right — allow myself to feel those emotions for a period of time, but recognize I still have to keep going.

A lot of people emphasize tuning out the negativity. But I watch the news — a lot. In my limited free time, I’m probably on social media a more than I should be. I’m constantly bombarded by a sea of terrible things happening in the country and the world, and I don’t think “don’t watch the news” or “stay off social media” is the answer, because I think it’s important to stay connected and informed.

I also love depressing movies — Manchester By The Sea, a movie about a really depressed guy who (spoiler) loses his kids in a house fire and becomes super depressed, was one of my favorite movies. It was a movie about darkness, but there was also a lot of humor and hope. I think it’s the way people kept going and kept living even in the darkest of circumstances that I find compelling and, dare I say, positive.

And that’s why I know why getting mired in the darkness and despairing in horrible circumstances can co-exist with being hopeful for a better future at the same time. I don’t think about despairing conditions every moment of every day, but I think about them a bit now — that every day is filled with highs and lows, that they all stay with us in some way.

My internal dialogue is often very conflicted, but at work and in much of my personal life, I think most of my perceived positivity is always being a yes man, not saying no to people. This makes people think I have a can-do attitude and am there to uplift others, but that’s not always super true. Sometimes my inability to say no comes from a sense of guilt about letting others down, and I am working on that, but always saying yes can be construed as optimism.

I lost my rose colored glasses for the world a long time ago, but I still think part of the positivity is the capacity to dream — of a world that can be better, of new possibilities and goals. I will keep dreaming. I will keep chasing for better, and while I do spend periods of time processing disappointment, devastation, and anger, particularly right now at my personal setback, I usually get back up after getting knocked down to try again.

That’s what positivity means to me — even in horrible circumstances, the ability to keep swinging and possibly miss again, the willingness to keep trying even though it might go horribly wrong or you might fail. You can take a shot and only have a 25% chance of it going in, but that’s better than the chance of not shooting at all.

According to Allie Volpe at BBC, tragic optimism is an antidote to toxic optimism and is the approach popularized by Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who authored Man’s Search for Meaning. This tragic optimism acknowledges life’s intense pain and suffering — it is one that acknowledges the difficulties and pain of the moment and also gives the ability to maintain hope. Suffering is a part of life that we all go through.

“To be tragically optimistic is a happy medium where instead of crushing our spirit, difficulties and challenges provide us with a learning moment, like re-framing the stress of giving a public speech as a challenge rather than a threat,” Volpe says.

I think there can be a lot of bad things that happen, and I’m not saying we all have to look through the world through rose colored eyes. I’m just saying that my choice is to look at the world through a lens that it could get better. It might be a delusional thought in light of all the pessimism of the world, but it is possible that things can get better.

Maybe it’s my ability to keep going and still think things can get better that is the source of my positivity, to know the future is uncertain, but our actions now lay the seeds for the future.

During my senior year of college, I did not see ways things could get better. But almost eight years later, things did get a lot better — I married my wife and graduated with a Master’s Degree and a law degree. I have lifelong friends I have been close with for a decade or more. Even in moments of darkness, in my faith, I have to remind myself that even if things don’t get better in this life, I believe they will get better in the next one.

Ultimately, I’m not a tragic and radical optimist because I want to be. I feel like I have to be. It’s how I keep going in difficult times, and sometimes I’m just probably fooling myself. Although I can’t see into a crystal ball to know that things will get better in the near future, I believe it’s possible because I have to. That’s how I keep swinging, and the worst thing I can do is not swing at all.

—

This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

***