My Positivity Project

5 minute read

I am sitting down to write a piece about newfound positivity on the day I have had three positive antigen tests and am waiting on a PCR result. Ordinarily, that may seem a little ironic, but I think three weeks of my Positivity Project 2022 may already be reaping rewards.

A day that would have sent me into a swift spiral of self-pity in November is remarkably calm and anxiety-free. I’m feeling ok about finally getting the dreaded virus.

With a child in preschool, I always felt it was inevitable that it would arrive at our door, and I spent most of December in a mist of anti-bac and fear.

But now that it’s here, it’s not the nightmare I feared. I’m hopeful that none of us will get too sick (and we’re very lucky that no one in the house is vulnerable), I’m thankful that it has happened now, a quiet week in January, and incredibly grateful that we dodged it in December so we could have Christmas with family.

I don’t know if I would be so calm about all of this had I not actively started to become more positive at the start of the year.

I have been very conscious of my slow slide into a half-empty glass for a little while now. Two years of working from home with two very small children will do that to a person, I guess. I’ve always been very good at seeing the other side of a situation. Not necessarily the bright side, because, believe me, I’ve been in situations that definitely didn’t have bright sides but the other side, the path that would eventually end up being bright. I’m good at making the argument for why that was the right decision at the time. I can see a glass half full, maybe not of champagne, but at least not half empty.

My natural state is ‘it will turn out ok in the end’ and it has served me well. It’s a take on ‘if it’s for you, it won’t pass you’ which I’ve definitely clung to more than a few times as a raft of hope in some very choppy waters.

But my optimism, like many others, has been chipped away over the last few months. As lockdown followed lockdown and plans got cancelled, I found it hard to get back up.

So over Christmas, I decided to try to find ways that might help me claw my way back to my natural state and reset my positivity. A lot has been written about practising active positivity and while I’d generally roll my eyes at that kind of thing, I knew that if I was going to change my focus I would need to expand my horizons.

It surprised me that what I read made sense. I was prepared for burning sage, performing moonlight rituals and dunking myself in ice baths and while all that may work for some, I knew that my deeply cynical soul would not be healed by rituals and replacing my coffee crutch with very expensive hot chocolate.

And while there were some rituals in the pieces I read, what most practitioners of active positivity said was that you have to make a choice. You have to choose to be positive every day, but that starts with choosing what you consume and who you surround yourself with.

At a time when there is always a screen close by we consume almost passively. It’s the news media, social media, streaming services, WhatsApp groups and more. If you had told my mother in the early 90s that by the time her daughter was in her 40s she would be bombarded with rolling news, content created by strangers and more messages from friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances than she could keep up, with she would have thought you had lost your mind. The closest she came to any of that was 40 minutes of news in the evening, Gerry Ryan on the radio, being subjected to slide shows of her friends’ holidays once a year and meeting the neighbours outside mass.

It was a quieter life and I craved some of that quiet.

I'm a journalist and a realist so I'm not cutting out news (I think it's vital to be informed and anyone who says to turn off the news completely is just creating a bubble) but I am carefully looking at my news sources and reducing it down to quality, not quantity. I have removed myself from Facebook groups that feed a culture of complaining and I'm curating my social feeds in general. There are accounts that make me feel bad and some that just annoy me so I’m unfollowing. Crucially, I’m not messaging the owners of those accounts to tell them. Firstly, I don’t think they’d care and secondly, it’s a weirdly narcissistic thing to do and may make them feel bad. That’s not the point here, I want to feel better, I don’t want anyone to feel worse. I'm exercising regularly and I’m loving it. I’m listening to happy, positive, funny podcasts about anything except murder and crime and, I think this is crucial, I'm getting fresh air.

I’m three weeks in and despite a really upsetting news week last week and the prospect of isolating with a three-year-old and two-year-old for a week I’m already in a better place than I have been for quite some time.

Cutting out the noise is essential. It creeps up until it’s so loud you can’t hear yourself think. I’m spending some time in silence and resetting my feeds and it’s working.

Everything is a habit and if I can make choosing to be happy one of mine, I'm hoping that by the end of the month I'll have trained my brain to feel better.

Ps: Reader, I got Covid.

Jennifer Stevens, January 2022