positivity, unfortunately

Why 'I don't want this' isn't a goal, and the reframing that raised the price of my consultation hour from €10 to €100.

For more than half my life, I was against positivity.

That was a mistake, and this letter is my way of admitting it. This isn’t an article about toxic positivity; it’s the opposite. My mind changed, and honestly, it annoys me.

It’s the same kind of annoyance as when someone tells you to go outside, drink some water, and get some sleep. The advice sounds stupid, like trying to cover a huge hole with a tiny band-aid. But then you actually go outside, drink the water, and sleep, and it works. That’s the infuriating part: the basic things really do work.

Why I didn’t trust it

When I was a child, there were good emotions and bad emotions, and I didn’t get to decide which was which. Sadness was on the bad list, along with anger, rage, and being unhappy about anything. Having those feelings wasn’t allowed, and if I did, I was punished. My parents couldn’t manage their own feelings, and mine were more than they could handle. The result was the opposite of what anyone wanted. By my teens, nothing felt good enough, and everything seemed wrong.

Then a classmate told me so. We were working on a project together. She brought me an idea, then a few more, and I answered with everything wrong with each of them. She got tired. Then she asked whether I had any ideas about how the thing could actually be done. I did not. That was the problem, and it had not occurred to me until she said it out loud.

Some of it was about where I grew up, not just about me. I’m half Ukrainian and spent part of my childhood in Russia during the nineties. Negativity wasn’t a personal quirk there; it was how everyone spoke. Criticism was the usual way to talk about anything. Complaining was a way to connect, like how other people might ask about your weekend. Underneath it all was what Russians call хтонь: a heavy, hopeless murk that doesn’t really have an English equivalent.

So I reached a conclusion, and it took twenty years to undo. All positivity is toxic. Not some of it. All of it.

The logic went like this: ‘Real’ and ‘true’ were always linked to something sad. If something was difficult, dark, or disappointing, it was considered the truth. If something was good, you were seen as naive, being fooled, or not looking hard enough yet. In that setup, positivity wasn’t just irritating—it felt dishonest. It kept you from seeing what was actually in front of you.

That’s why every piece of advice about optimism felt like a threat instead of a suggestion. Being told to look on the bright side felt like being told to shut down a feeling, just like when I was a child and certain feelings were declared unacceptable.

What changed

Therapy, first, over a long time. Slowly, it stopped being ‘everything is bad’ or ‘everything is fine’ and became a range with a great deal of room. Much of my reading of any situation turned out to be tilted before I had started looking. Where I stood had been a reaction. Nobody had ever decided it, including me.

Then came ICF coach training, which is where it all came together for me. I mention ICF because ‘coach’ can mean almost anything these days. The International Coaching Federation has its own methodology, certification, and standards, and that’s the one I trained in.

While you train, you also get coached yourself. And one of the things you are taught is to help clients say their goals in positive terms. Most people do not do this unprompted. They arrive with ‘I want to stop scrolling TikTok’, ‘I want to stop taking clients who drain me’, ‘I want to stop being tired by Wednesday’.

It looks like nothing. A technique. Almost a formatting rule.

It changed something anyway, because I saw how constantly I do it myself. How often I look at a thing I do not like, think ‘I wish it wasn’t like this’, and call that a goal.

Then came the part that made acceptance possible. This kind of positivity doesn’t shut anything down. You can be a very positive person and still feel bad, sad, angry, or disappointed—those feelings don’t conflict. Nothing gets pushed aside. You feel what you feel, and then you decide what to do next. The objection I carried for twenty years turned out not to apply.

Why it works, which is the annoying part

Let me be clear about what is true. Working out what you do not like matters, and saying it out loud is a real stage. I am not asking anyone to skip it.

But ‘I never want it to be like that again’ carries an enormous amount of feelings. Almost nobody reframes this on their own, and there’s a good reason for that. If you grew up in a crisis, nobody asked what was nice, pleasant, or good. That habit never developed. Girls are taught to be modest, not to ask, and to take what they’re given. And women often don’t say what they want, even when asked directly. What was nice, or pleasant, or good — the habit never got built. Girls get taught to be modest, not to ask, to take what they are given. And women very often do not say what they want, even when asked directly.

So, in practice

Take the sentence as it comes and write it down. Then, write a second sentence underneath that describes what you want instead—not just the absence of the first thing, but a real description of something you want.

The test is simple: if the second sentence still includes words like no, not, without, less, or stop, it hasn’t changed yet. Keep going.

Clients. ‘No more clients who message me at midnight.’ Reframe: I want clients who respect me and my time.

Pricing. ‘I don’t want to feel awkward about my prices.’ Reframe: I want a month with six clients at 100 euros each, which will cover my rent and leave Fridays free. Now there is arithmetic to do rather than a feeling to manage.

The week. ‘I don’t want to be exhausted by Thursday.’ Reframe: I want no more than two calls a day, mornings free, and one full day with nothing in it. That is a calendar rule. You can implement a calendar rule.

Why our brains make this worse

Someone replies to you with one word. Or takes two days to answer. Or says nothing at all.

And you know immediately what it means. She is annoyed with you. She has changed her mind. You did something wrong. It does not feel like a guess — it feels like something you have found out.

In auDHD spaces this is called rejection sensitive dysphoria: an intense, physically painful response to rejection, criticism or disapproval, real or assumed, far out of proportion to what actually happened.

What it cost me

‘Neurodivergent people don’t have money.’ I hear this constantly from colleagues who also work with neurodivergent clients, and the conclusion is always the same: the product has to be cheap.

I believed it too. When I started, a consultation cost ten euros. Doing them for nothing was under serious consideration, and I am extremely glad that did not happen.

Since January last year, the price has been rising steadily. It is a hundred euros now — ten times what it started at. People bought at ten euros, and people buy at a hundred. The market did not change. What changed is that I could ask.

That is what the positive version actually bought me: enough room to ask for ten times more.

And the sentence itself is too vague to be either true or false. Who are we talking about? Only formally diagnosed people? Only people with a mental health diagnosis alongside it? What about everyone who has not told anyone, or does not yet know it about herself, including those working in tech and earning 4,000 euros a month or more? It is not a market observation. It is a mood with a demographic attached.

It also keeps coming up with its own evidence. Price low, and you reach people who can only pay low. Then the low prices look like proof.

This is one of the things ICF coaching does well: it takes a sentence that presents itself as a fact about the world, and finds out whether it is one.

What I’m not saying

Nobody should ignore how much pain there is in the world. There is a great deal of it; it is real, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of lying.

What I am trying to do is not land in either extreme. There is an optimism that requires you to look away from suffering to keep working. And there is the version where you sink into the suffering until it is the only thing there is and you never allow yourself to be glad about anything. Both leave you seeing about the same, very small amount.

And sometimes people are in a genuinely bad state. Depression, trauma, the serious versions of both. None of this applies there. That is what therapy is for, and this letter is not that.

The last part

I am happier now than I have been at any point in my life. It is an astonishing feeling, and I am not going to be embarrassed about it. Saying it out loud took a while — forming the sentence ‘I like everything about my life’ felt like promising too much to someone, probably to myself, and being held to it later. Jinxing it was a worry as well, and I do not believe in jinxes.

I was not scared of being happy. I was scared of saying so. Which is the same fear as saying out loud what you want — and saying it is most of the work.

Positivity, unfortunately.