A case of luck or just pure toxic positivity?

My friend sends me photos of her car: the windscreen is crushed into a strange angular shape, the frame warped by the impact. 

She’s beside the highway but I see no blood. Also she’s sending messages, so she’s alive. “That was some Final Destination shit,” she writes. There she was motoring along the N12 at 120km/h on a sunny Saturday, when a dining-room chair fell from the sky onto her car. 

She had been in the right lane overtaking a bakkie loaded house-high with furniture, thinking to herself that it looked rather unstable, when THWACK! A near-death experience. 

“God was watching over you,” says a woman who stops to help. 

“God threw a chair at me,” thinks my friend, but she doesn’t say anything because the woman is kind. I show Himself the pictures. 

“She was lucky,” he says. But no, she wasn’t lucky at all. She was hit by a flying chair at 120km/h. She was very unlucky. Another friend skidded off her bicycle going over a patch of oil. 

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She smacked her chin and damaged all the soft bits in her knee. Her bike is wrecked. She’s lucky, people tell her; it could’ve been worse, they say. If she’d broken her leg she’d have been lucky that it wasn’t her head (because “luckily” she was wearing a helmet), and if she’d broken her head, she’d be lucky to be alive… Yes, lucky indeed, so let’s all “look on the bright side.” Let’s pile on the platitudes. You have a headache? 

Lucky it’s not a brain tumour. Let’s all remind victims of every dire thing that might have happened so they know just how fortunate they are. I’m an optimist by nature, but this isn’t optimism. 

There’s a name for it: toxic positivity. Sure, being upbeat is what we do when we’re trying to make people feel better, but what if it also negates their unhappy feelings? If we’re telling them they’re lucky, then how dare they feel otherwise – unlucky, scared, sad, or furious. 

Yes, “everything happens for a reason”, but it’s not always a divine reason.

A chair fell from the sky because someone overloaded a bakkie; a cyclist came off her bike because a car leaked oil. Those are the reasons. It’s rotten luck, and yet here we are.

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