Avoiding toxic misery
(Nimue)
Misery itself is inevitable in life, and often a fair response to experience. There’s nothing inherently toxic about misery. However as with most emotions, the issue is how we deal with it. There are a number of widely held ideas about misery that need strenuously resisting.
Misery can be presented as romantic, attractive and inevitable for anyone sensitive or thoughtful. While being sensitive and thoughtful means you are going to feel the woes of the world more keenly, you will also feel the good things more keenly too. If you treasure the good things and focus on gratitude, then there’s no reason for sensitivity to equate to constant misery.
We may be too willing to equate misery with depth. Again, there’s no real truth to this. Miserable people can be shallow and ignorant too. I suspect it is easier to be relentlessly miserable if you are self-obsessed, inward looking and selfish. The person who rejoices when good things happen to their friends, who delights in small beauties and cherishes the wins isn’t going to be that invested in their own misery.
This kind of thinking goes hand in hand with considering joy, laughter and happiness to be trivial and lesser emotions. It comes up a lot around the kind of books that are taken seriously as literature and the kinds that are treated as flimsy. Joy is not flimsy. Delight is vitally important and worthy of respect.
Misery is not a virtue. It does not mark a person out as being more serious, worthy or substantial. It is not proof of depth. Brooding mournfully has its place in gothic fiction but in real life it gets tedious really quickly, and there’s nothing romantic about it at all.
Around activism, you can find issues of people feeling they have to be constantly serious and fight the good fight and never have nice things because it all has to be about the revolution. This is emotionally exhausting and unsustainable. If your revolution has no place for joy, it’s just a new form of tyranny in the making.
One of the most toxic forms misery takes is when the person suffering wants everyone else to suffer too. I know a lot of people who have been through truly awful things, and the vast majority of them do not respond by wanting other people to share in that. Some become activists trying to protect others from the harm they suffered. Many are deeply compassionate in the face of other people’s pain, but also invested in making what good they can. The people who want others to share their misery – based on what I’ve seen – often haven’t suffered very much at all. It may be more about jealousy in face of other people’s happiness.
Joy is essential. Misery is unavoidable. Don’t let anyone persuade you that you do not deserve joy, or that your lack of relentless misery is some kind of shortcoming.
