The downside of always being up

Tigger. The Energizer Bunny. Pollyanna. These are the characters people compared me to growing up. I love these adjectives because they’re accurate descriptors of me. I trend toward the happy, energetic, and sunny side of life.

And yet… I was lumped in with fictitious creatures. I’m a real girl with real worries and hurts, but I was bound and determined to stay “up” all the time.

But there’s a downside to being up.

Susan David in Emotional Agility, hits the nail on the head as she describes my quest to constantly stay up, “Anything less than bright and chipper is a sign of weakness, a surefire way to alienate those around me.” Preach sister, preach.

For decades, I thought that if I’m unhappy, no one will like me. While it’s true that most of us would prefer being happy over sad, it’s equally true that just because we’re sad doesn’t mean we’re unlikeable. But in the world of extreme thinking, being happy = lots of friends ergo being sad = no one will want to be my friend… ever.

I thought that if I’m unhappy, it must be because I can’t handle stress. As an Achiever, one who leans more on herself and less on the God of amazing grace, I believe that I’m perfectly suited to handle whatever life throws my way. And if I’m unhappy, stressed, or have a problem, clearly I’m not as capable as I thought. And this girl can’t handle that thought.

Bottling our emotions is the currency of always uppers. You learn how to bottle emotions and ignore troubling feelings. Emotional bottlers focus on thinking positively, pushing negative thoughts away, and charging ahead for the sake of productivity. (David in Emotional Agility)

The downside to always being up is steep.

It isn’t sustainable. In fact, it’s very hurtful, not only to our hearts, but to our relationships. When we push feelings away for the sake of being up, we negatively impact our emotional and relational health.

Being perpetually happy doesn’t fix what’s hurting. Instead of working through our angry, sad, frustrated, or irritable feelings, we push them down and carry on, which only serves to amplify our thoughts and emotions. (David)

And when we seek to suppress negative emotions, we end up suppressing all emotions, even the good ones. Denying anger, pain, disappointment, and rejection means denying joy, love, connection and hope. Brené Brown writes in The Gift of Imperfection, “When we numb the dark, we numb the light.” This also causes us to deny ourselves compassion and care because we don’t allow ourselves to feel the entire spectrum of feelings. Our needs are so suppressed that we don’t even know what they are, making it impossible to be compassionate with ourselves or ask others for help.

This leads us to live a very compartmentalized life. Instead of living in the integrated way God designed, we keep our feelings quarantined from work, friends, and family. Our people don’t know what’s bothering us leaving us to process alone. At the same time, our fake happy is turning people off. Our desire to be happy because we think people won’t like us sad actually pushes them away. People who are always up seem un-relatable.

Always being up causes us to miss out on Jesus. Always being up in our right-now life translates into always being up in our quiet time with Jesus. When we can’t bring our real self to Jesus, we miss out on His balm of grace, restoring power, and His comfort.

The best way to combat our tendency to always be up is to become God-centered.

It’s easy to swing into extremes: if the way isn’t to always be up, then it must be to always be down, serious, and sad — uh, no. The way to live is the way of Jesus. He felt emotions like compassion, anger, grief, anguish, love, joy, and loneliness.

Jesus didn’t deny His feelings, and He didn’t slap a Scripture on a situation and glibly tell Himself or others that it would all be okay. He cried to show us that God isn’t afraid of our emotions. He also modeled being present and sharing in the emotions of others. He was God With Us.

The trick is that, while we’re feeling our feelings, we need to keep them tethered to His perfect love. Mary cried in the presence of Jesus, and Jesus cried in the presence of His Father. We should not feel our emotions alone. We should always take them back to the Father who created them.

To be clear, Jesus is full of joy. He created it and wants to share it with us, but He isn’t about fake fines and superficial smiles. Jesus is about real happiness and profound joy, the kind that makes you laugh all the way down in your belly. The way of Jesus isn’t to fake joy but to experience the real thing.

Y’all, I love Tigger, the Energizer Bunny, and Pollyanna. They make me happy. But I’m not them, and I don’t need to be. I can live an integrated life as I enjoy and grieve with my people, as I care for myself and live in community, and as I recognize my hurt and take it to Jesus. Always being up has a downside, and I’m done with it.