Much like the word "healthy", the word "positive" has taken on an insidiously modern marketing meaning that degrades its usage, as is common for the average English speaker who understands commerce without having enough poetry in the soul to make an actual difference about how we feel. Anyone who takes on serious issues that are complex are derisively referred to as "Negative Nellies", so closely monitored must the "Thought Police" of the world be, in sullen reaction to mature adults. I'm often a favorite target for passive-aggressiveness because I am not typically "wrong" about anything, because it's part of my job to know you, which is also quite often followed by a schoolyard taunt of "Know-It-All" delivered as a sulky potshot given behind my back (in yet another nod to my power as a mother), in a never-ending posture that is the typical defensiveness of passive-aggressors.
I can digest content that's dark, troubling, scary, tough, difficult, or "grim" (as one hapless library clerk noted), because in the land of dissociative disorders, your closed-door horrors are the messes of the world for other, much more gifted people to clean up, much like your child abuse and domestic violence. One crazy design manager superficially characterized my cover designs as "gritty", which is pathetic and pointless to a native New Yorker working among blood-thirsty sharks, in the fiercest urban jungle on the planet. Huh...ya think? Uh, yeah. Life is gritty at times. She didn't last very long because she sucked at her job, which at one time meant styling chapter openers for a typographer to set and print: not exactly a set-yourself-on-fire kind of job, intellectually-speaking.
Noticing that a publisher like me can process those very acts of human horror wrought daily upon society (often directed at the infirm, elderly, and the very young) is the highest compliment you can give a master artist like me, because it means we can handle the subjects that you can't. Turning away from the darkness hidden away in the human soul does nothing to address it properly, let alone help problem-solve it out of existence. It's another reason that I'm consistently surprised when the ignorant uneducated drunk in our neighborhood has an arrogant sense of superiority over, say, someone like me. Only the craziest fuck on the block would try to place oneself above me, because they tap out of life on the regular over, say, walking beyond the corner to carry actual groceries, let alone being smart enough to sort trash properly, as is legally required. Checking out from life and realism means you can't do shit in human, and that's a serious fuck-up to me.
"Negative" has become the playground taunt du jour that refers to anything the mentally ill deem unfit for their lazy contemplation, in a twisted distortion about what a true sense of self means, essential as it is to be successful in this world. How much can you check out of life? You'd be surprised. Don't like your sister-in-laws keen observations about your eating disorder? Call her "mean" and cut her out! She's not fit to be in your bisexual bipolar cheerleader squad anyway (and thank G-d for that)! Don't like your niece noticing your wild hoarding disorder? That's okay. She once smoked a pot cigarette, so she's schizo, too (doesn't work that way, duh). Desperately insecure about your abilities and capabilities? Well, shame people into a dysfunctional tense silence that does nothing but abuse, so that you can feel better about your alcoholism behind closed doors.
I'm sure there's a book or a movie or a program somewhere that addresses what you lack, as a lifelong coward. That's okay. I'll fight your battles and win them all, by your lack of failures. In truth, it's the lack of a well-rounded life that presents itself most glaringly. The chick who can only handle rom-com's? Gay, deeply closeted, insane, and into cat hoarding. It's the art of reading people that I mastered a long time ago, like scoping out the musicians at a recording studio by their lyrics, clothes, and attitudes. I really didn't need to hear their bad Goth audio tracks in progress to know that the lead guy from the band dressed in all black and heavy eyeliner sitting at my art director's desk with devil art had some "issues" to work out (another carefully guarded, softly peddled euphemism for madness that's supposedly "rude" to say out loud in any real, honest way). By allowing the seriously ill to demonize our maturity and range of emotions, we allow them to manipulatively control us, which is not a warrior's way.
And that's what it's really about: their mental problems, not yours. It's a clinically immature way of saying "I know you are but what am I" over and over again until you feel you block out the world that seeps in anyway. It's a desperately deceitful way of guarding against improving through applied learning from an advanced understanding of the world's knowledge, which is real power. If I know (because I read the book) and you don't (because you're knitting the same cat hair sweater over and over again), then I win, and here's the kicker, because I always do. I'm not afraid to shine a light in the hidden corners of the human psyche, the same way the NYPD cleans up your gruesome murder scene involving a two year-old and his teenage mother, or a WWII vet relives the horrors of concentration camps, as they tenderly buried the corpse of a woman holding her child in your gas chambers of the world. Because it's real. That's why.
