It's Christmas Eve. TikTok is full of "positive encouragement" content (the search trend's been climbing for weeks) and I've been watching it in the way you watch something that's both appealing and faintly nauseating, like a glazed donut at 1am. The intention is good. The execution makes me want to close every app and stare at the ceiling.
"You are enough." "You've got this." "Good things are coming." "The universe is working for you." Okay. Sure. But I have been broke, I have been genuinely lost, I have been so deep in self-doubt that I couldn't finish a sentence in my own journal, and none of those phrases reached me. They didn't reach me because they didn't acknowledge the actual situation. They tried to skip over the hard thing and land in the good feeling, and that's not encouragement. That's avoidance wearing a motivational poster font.
Real encouragement respects your intelligence. It doesn't pretend the hard thing isn't hard. It sits next to you in the hard thing and says: yeah, this is real, and you're still here, and here's what I actually see in you. That's different. That lands differently. And I'd like to try to give you some of it today (Christmas Eve, cold apartment, Lazarus the pothos doing something suspicious near the window) because you deserve better than a generic affirmation card.
Why Toxic Positivity Fails
There's a name for the good-vibes-only approach: toxic positivity. I want to be careful here because the word "toxic" gets applied to so many things now that it's lost some weight. But in this case it earns it. Toxic positivity is specifically the dynamic where expressions of negative emotion get suppressed or dismissed in favor of manufactured positive framing, even when the negative emotion is valid and important.
"Everything happens for a reason." Said to someone who just experienced a devastating loss. Not helpful. Profoundly unhelpful. Because the grieving person doesn't need a philosophical framework right now. They need their grief acknowledged as real. When you skip straight to "the bright side," you are implicitly telling the other person that their dark feeling is not welcome, which means they are not fully welcome. They learn to hide the hard stuff. That's lonelier, not better.
"Just think positive!" Said to someone in the middle of a genuine crisis, financial, medical, relational. This is particularly insidious because it puts the blame for outcomes onto the sufferer's mental state. If the bad thing is happening because you weren't positive enough, then the bad thing is your fault. This is cruelty wearing optimism's clothes. Some things are hard because they are genuinely hard, not because of insufficient gratitude journaling.
I grew up in an environment, church, school, family, where being sad or scared or angry was treated as a sign of spiritual deficit. If you were struggling, the implication was that you needed more faith, more prayer, more surrender. The possibility that the struggle was legitimate and deserved real engagement wasn't on the table. It took me a long time to understand that what I'd been taught to do with my hard feelings was suppress them, and that suppression isn't healing. it's just delay with interest.
what blunt kindness actually looks like
So what's the alternative? Let me try to be actually useful here instead of just criticizing the existing thing.
Blunt kindness starts with acknowledgment. Not "I'm so sorry" as a verbal tic, not the performative empathy face. Actual acknowledgment. "That sounds genuinely hard." "I can see why you're exhausted." "That would have broken most people." Notice these statements don't try to fix anything yet. They don't offer solutions or silver linings. They just confirm that what you're experiencing is real and that the person speaking sees it. That confirmation is not small. For a lot of people, especially people who were raised to perform fine-ness (hi), just having someone reflect back "yeah, this is hard" is the first exhale they've had in weeks.
Then it goes to specificity. Generic encouragement fails because it's interchangeable. "You've got this" could be said to literally anyone, and therefore it carries no actual weight for you specifically. Specific encouragement names what it sees. "I watched you rebuild from that last setback, and it was real, and you did it." That's a different sentence. It requires the speaker to have paid attention. And the receiving person feels seen rather than just patted.
This is hard to do for yourself, which is why I want to try. Here's my actual attempt at the kind of encouragement I would have wanted at the hardest points in the last few years.
The Actual Encouragement Part
If you're reading this and you've been grinding at something (a creative project, a degree, a financial hole you're digging out of, a relationship you're trying to save or end honestly) and it's taking longer than you thought and you're tired: that's real. The tiredness is real. You're not weak for feeling it. Duration is hard in a way that people who haven't stayed with something long don't fully understand. The fantasy version of perseverance is cinematic, montage, breakthrough, triumph. The actual version is more like: do the next small thing, feel bad about not doing more, sleep badly, repeat. That's what it actually looks like. You're in that. You're still there. That counts.
If you've been told (by a church, a family, a culture, a romantic partner) that your feelings are too much, too negative, too complicated: that was a lie and the person who said it was not equipped for you. You are not too much. You are the correct amount of you. What you needed was someone who could hold all of it, and maybe you didn't have that, and maybe you've spent years making yourself smaller to fit into spaces that were built for someone less. Stop doing that. The people who can actually hold you are out there, and they have been looking for someone exactly as complicated as you are.
If you're an artist or a musician or a writer who's been at it for years with results that don't match the effort: I'm in that with you, and I won't pretend it always evens out, because I don't know if it does. But here's what I'll say about craft. it compounds. Every song I wrote that went nowhere taught me something I'm using right now on the record I'm making. The embarrassing ones, the ones that didn't land, the ones I deleted. They're not wasted. They're in the foundation. You can't see the foundation of a building but it's holding everything up.
If you're depressed and the encouragement posts make it worse because they feel like a gap between where you are and where you're "supposed" to be: please don't measure yourself against the highlight reel. Please don't. I have days (whole stretches of days) where getting out of bed is the full accomplishment and my version of winning is eating a real meal and not being awful to myself. That's allowed. That's what some chapters look like. You don't have to be inspirational. You just have to be alive and get to the next day.
On Encouragement as a Practice
Something I've learned, slowly and not without resistance, is that being an encouraging person is actually a skill and not a personality trait you either have or don't. It can be practiced. It gets better the more you do it, and it requires some uncomfortable things: paying real attention to people, sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to fix it, saying true things out loud even when a generic platitude would be easier.
I've gotten better at it with my own small circle. Not perfect. I still sometimes reflexively say "it'll be okay" when what my friend actually needs is a long hug and no words at all. But I've gotten better at catching myself and trying again. At asking: what does this person actually need right now? Sometimes it's practical help. Sometimes it's just presence. Sometimes it's someone saying clearly, with full eye contact (metaphorically, since we're talking about text): you are not as broken as you think you are, and I can tell you why I think that.
That last one is the one I offer you today. You are not as broken as you think you are. And the evidence for that is: you're still here, you're still asking for something (even something as small as a TikTok scroll for "positive encouragement" at whatever hour it is where you are) and that's an act of hope, even if it doesn't feel like one. Wanting things to be better is hope. You have it. Let's not waste it on a generic poster quote.
A Christmas Eve Note
Look, this time of year is hard for a lot of people and soft-pedaling that does nobody any favors. If the holidays are cozy and joyful for you, I'm genuinely happy about that. But if you're someone for whom the season amplifies the gaps (the people who aren't here anymore, the family dynamics that are still tangled, the life that hasn't yet arrived) I see you. Today is just December 24th. It carries the weight we give it, and you don't have to give it more weight than you can hold.
I'm in my apartment with cold coffee and Lazarus the pothos and a record I'm still making, and this is a fine place to be. I am genuinely grateful for everyone who reads these posts, for everyone who shows up, for the mess and the beauty and the fact that we're all somehow still here doing this weird thing of being alive.
Happy Christmas if you celebrate. And if you don't, happy December 24th. One of the better prime numbers, and I'm choosing to take that as a sign.