How do you feel today? How do you really feel? To be honest, I’m not feeling that great. In fact, every day I feel myself getting angrier, more heartbroken, more disappointed. How could I not be, knowing what I know? Dead bodies keep piling up in Gaza. In Ukraine, a madman threatens with the ghost of an empire. In Afghanistan, women like me are now voiceless. In the U.K., the place I call home, the anti-migration rhetoric reaches ever new heights with every passing day. And the list goes on, both at the global and the personal level. How not to be angry and heartbroken when faced with endless violence and incitements to hate?
These days, I keep recalling one dissonant moment from years ago, a silly thing really, but I think about it a lot. A few years back, we had a so-called mental health workshop at my place of work. A lady came in, bringing notebooks and worksheets, mental ill health statistics, and much advice about how to support a colleague if they seemed like they weren’t having a great time. So far, so good, but the crowning glory of the workshop was her concluding statement: in order to cultivate good mental health, we have to cultivate an “attitude of gratitude,” she told us. Every day, we shoud sit down and make a list of things we’re grateful for and in no time we’ll see how much better we feel. Of course, that made me angry, really angry. Later, after she’d left, I joked with a colleague that I’d rather cultivate an “attitude of angry-tude.”
That is something I still stand by. Everyone who knows me well knows that I’ve long been bothered by the toxic positivity “philosophy” often pandered by mental health coaches in the U.K. and the U.S. This often hinges on the false claim that if you only try hard enough, shift your mindset, and focus on all the nice things you have in your privileged life, you’ll be instantly happy, and continue to remain so for as long as you practice this fake sort of “mindfulness exercise.” Of course toxic positivity is something that an oppressive system benefits from – if it shifts the blame onto you, the individual, for feeling anything other than motivated and energised, then oppressors in positions of power never need to take responsibility for their actions, or for their lack of action. And if you work hard at being happy and motivated every day, you’ll be a better worker, more productive and obedient.
Here’s what. I am grateful. I count my blessings every day. I think about how immensely lucky I am to be able to live my life in relative peace, how incredibly lucky it is that I’m able to hold my loved ones close at a time when other people in the world are wondering if their loved ones are still alive. I’m grateful for everything I have, of course I am. And at the same time I’m heartbroken, witnessing the sorry state of the world, which I often feel so powerless to influence even in small ways. And I am angry, so very angry all the time – about racism, xenophobia, misogyny, abuses of power. You can be all these things at once – grateful and heartbroken and angry. It is OK to be all these things at once.
In fact, my message is: be grateful and heartbroken and angry. Don’t let yourself become numbed by the pressure to stay positive. Do not stay positive when the world is on fire. And do not let anger and heartbreak consume you – feel them and use them. Let them be the catlyst for you to do what you feel you can do, whether that be writing about what’s important to you, or reaching out to friends you haven’t heard from in a while and you worry about. Work with anger and heartbreak. They are valid and necessary feelings, and “an attitude of gratitude” should not, does not invalidate them. By all means, cultivate gratitude. Cultivate anger, too.
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