Personally, I’ve never found it appropriate to label people as toxic. I would rather call decisions they made bad ones that resulted in unhealthy situations/relationships but honestly, I could be wrong. I feel like everyone does what they do for a reason; be it societal validation, physical appeal or even fifteen minutes of fame. I believe everything is done for and because of some reason-whatever it may be.
What is a toxic situation and what is a toxic person?
A toxic situation is one that proves detrimental to the mental health of parties involved-by my definition. A toxic person- what I understand it to be that is – is someone under such circumstances believed to have been the root cause of the whole situation.
When people make certain decisions that negatively affect others, it’s either unintentional-in this case they would be apologetic- because they are oblivious of the other people’s feelings or it was done intentionally. In each case it all goes down to mental health and maturity. In a case whereby a person intentionally hurts someone else, I think it’s safe to say that that person has the mindset of an immature child. When wrong things are done unintentionally if not efficiently dealt with they could end up becoming a habit and eventually a toxic situation. In a case where the person regarded as toxic is oblivious, as much as I’d like to say they are at no fault, they are. Ignorance is not a solid excuse and if truly apologetic the offender should try and gain more knowledge so the situation can be helped.
You can’t put toxic in a box
Moving on, one mistake people make, is assuming that ‘toxic’ is limited to relationships with friends, family or spouses. There could be toxic habits, apps, shows, movies and especially toxic content from creators/influencers.
Other examples of toxic
Now permit me to briefly focus on content creators and what we see on social media. I personally believe that the most toxic environment is the one that exists on social media. Certain types of content make us feel hated, insecure, dumb and unloved. Certain types of social media accepts content that slur certain types of people. Some social media praises people for hate crimes and bringing down other people. Some social media platforms help in dividing everyone using hate and sugarcoating it with catchy phrases. At the end of the day though, social media can be beneficial or toxic depending on the user. So we need to watch what we watch.
That aside, we have people with toxic mindsets convincing others that some things that are not okay are okay and vice versa. What’s more we have societal norms that normalize some forms of toxic behavior or even make people fetishize them. For example, to me, pessimism is toxic -the action itself, not pessimistic people. Being overly pessimistic is being a hindrance to progress (i.e yours and that of people around you). However ignorant/foolish optimism is still detrimental in a sense. A situation where one can identify clearly where they are and where they want to be while creating plans to achieve that and accepting good criticism along the way is the overall best mix and I call that the mindset of a realistic visionary-aka the people that end up making it big. When a person gives or receives hate comments like “your work is totally bad“ instead of “this is what’s wrong here is an idea of how to fix it.” or “your dreams are too big and impossible” instead of “do you have a good plan?”,I take that as toxicity.
Toxic people?
People get in bad situations and make bad choices and the media will never hesitate in cancelling or dragging anyone suspected of the kind of toxicity they hate and or calling out the toxicity they love. Instead of implementing cancel culture-when a person that is suspected of being toxic in media is called out, insulted publicly and shunned- I feel like the best medicine for someone at the receiving end of a toxic situation( be it bullying or manipulation) is to forgive and try and understand the person who caused them harm’s situation after seeking help. Cancel culture doesn't spread positivity so why is it popularize? The ‘toxic’ people need help. Can’t we help them? Connect them with a therapist? Then again , this is just my thinking.
In general every decision we make as people is a choice between toxicity or positivity, love or hate and right or wrong. We could choose to call people toxic or choose to understand them. We could choose to become people’s definition of toxic or use our past experiences to be beneficial to others spreading positivity. We can’t change or control things that happened in our past but we can control whether or not we let that shape our future.
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