I've been visiting my friend's grandma lately, and we recently watched two stories on a broadcast of CBS Sunday Morning that approached suffering from very different directions.
In a segment about grudges and forgiveness, author and Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza spoke about the anger she carried for a time after most of her family was murdered.
She described remaining consumed by anger as being “married to your enemies.”
Even when they are nowhere near you, they continue accompanying you—occupying your thoughts, affecting your emotions, and shaping how you experience your life.
Later in the program, actor Alan Alda discussed living with Parkinson’s disease.
He did not pretend the condition was easy or temporary.
Parkinson’s is part of his present reality, and it sometimes frustrates him.
At the same time, he looks for humor within that reality so the disease does not define every moment of his life.
One story centered on releasing anger about something that had already happened; the other explored living with something that could not simply be made to disappear.
Yet both raised a similar question: how do we face painful realities without allowing them to consume everything else?
That question matters to me because people sometimes confuse honesty with hopelessness.
I have been accused of being negative, focusing too much on suffering, adopting a “victim mentality,” or refusing to move forward because I speak plainly about abuse, neglect, disability, homelessness, trauma, and chronic autistic burnout.
Some people seem to believe that healing requires me to stop naming what happened—or to tell the story in a softer, more comfortable way that does not disturb anyone.
But acknowledging that I was harmed is not the same as believing I am helpless.
Recognizing that I was victimized does not mean victimhood is the totality of my identity.
Grieving what was taken from me does not mean I believe nothing beautiful can ever grow in its place.
If I had no hope, humor, creativity, faith, or ability to notice light amid darkness, I would not have survived everything I have.
Those qualities have helped keep me alive, but they have not required me to call darkness light, pretend devastating circumstances were secretly wonderful, or act as though suffering left no lasting consequences.
Multiple truths can exist at once.
I can acknowledge the terrible things people have done to me while still believing goodness exists.
I can grieve what was taken while building something different.
I can feel anger, laugh amid hardship, and accept what is true without allowing any one reality to define my entire future.
This is not about using the correct mentality to magically eliminate illness, trauma, poverty, disability, injustice, or grief.
Perspective cannot replace safety, medical care, material resources, accountability, accommodations, or meaningful support.
People cannot think themselves out of every circumstance, and suggesting otherwise often places responsibility for suffering on the people already carrying its heaviest consequences.
But even when we cannot choose what happened—or immediately change what is happening—we may still have some choice in what we allow it to become within us.
Emotional health is not the absence of anger, grief, fear, frustration, or pain; it is not a permanent performance of cheerfulness.
Perhaps it is the ability to listen to what our emotions are telling us, respond to reality honestly, and decide that no single feeling, diagnosis, person, or painful chapter will be permitted to tell the whole story.
Honesty is not hopelessness; sometimes honesty is where genuine hope begins.
Jessica Carey
Anger Is a Messenger, Not a Moral Failure
Anger is often treated as though its presence automatically signals bitterness, immaturity, negativity, or a lack of healing, but anger is not inherently bad.
Like other emotions, anger carries information.
It may tell us that a boundary has been violated, an injustice has occurred, someone is in danger, or something important needs to change.
It can provide the energy needed to speak up, leave an unsafe situation, defend someone vulnerable, challenge a harmful system, or refuse to continue accepting the unacceptable.
There is a reason we sometimes speak of righteous anger.
Throughout history, much-needed change has often begun because someone became angry enough about cruelty, exploitation, inequality, or injustice to stop treating it as normal.
The goal should not be to eliminate anger entirely; it should be to understand what the anger is communicating and decide what we will do with that information.
Anger may say:
- This is hurting me.
- This is unfair.
- This person is not safe.
- Something I value has been violated.
- This cannot continue.
Listening to those messages does not require us to surrender control of our behavior.
Feeling angry does not give us permission to abuse, threaten, manipulate, humiliate, or harm other people.
Our emotions may explain our reactions, but they do not automatically excuse every action we take because of them.
We can feel anger without becoming cruel.
We can confront wrongdoing without reproducing it.
We can use anger to establish a boundary instead of using it as a weapon.
We can let it move us toward protection, accountability, advocacy, or change rather than revenge.
It is also important not to assume that lingering anger always means someone is stubbornly refusing to forgive.
Sometimes the harm is still happening.
Sometimes there has been no safety, accountability, repair, or meaningful acknowledgment.
Sometimes trauma leaves the nervous system reacting to a threat long after the mind understands that a particular moment has passed.
A person cannot always decide that anger has lasted long enough and simply switch it off.
This is especially important when speaking with survivors.
Telling someone to “let it go” may sound peaceful, but it can become another way of pressuring them into silence before the harm has even been fully named.
It may ask the wounded person to make everyone else comfortable while those responsible avoid accountability.
Healing is not proven by becoming emotionally convenient.
The question is not merely: “Am I still angry?”
More useful questions might be:
- What is this anger trying to protect?
- Is the danger over, or is something harmful still happening?
- What boundary, action, support, or change might be needed?
- Is this anger helping me respond to the problem—or has it begun controlling parts of my life that the offender should no longer possess?
Anger can knock on the door carrying an important message; we can invite it to speak without giving it the deed to the house.
Its arrival does not make us bad people, but once we understand what it is telling us, we become responsible for choosing what we build from it.
Jessica Carey
When the Messenger Becomes the Master
Anger may begin as a response to something outside us, but when it remains unresolved, it can gradually occupy more of our internal world.
We may replay the offense repeatedly, imagining what we should have said or what the other person deserves.
We may search constantly for evidence that confirms the worst of what we have come to believe.
Anger toward one person may begin spilling into unrelated relationships.
We may become so focused on what was taken from us that we lose contact with what is still present—or what might still be possible.
This is where Immaculée Ilibagiza’s image of being “married to your enemies” becomes so powerful.
A person can be physically absent from our lives and still accompany us everywhere.
They may influence our mood, decisions, relationships, sense of safety, and ability to experience the present.
We may organize our lives around proving them wrong, imagining their punishment, or waiting for an apology that may never arrive.
The original harm was not our fault, yet without choosing it, we may find ourselves continuing to carry the person who caused it.
This is sometimes described through the familiar saying that holding onto hatred is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
The metaphor is imperfect—anger is not poison simply because it exists—but it captures an important danger.
Our suffering does not necessarily reach the person responsible for it.
They may remain unaware, indifferent, or unwilling to change while we continue paying the emotional cost.
Recognizing that cost is not the same as blaming ourselves for it.
No one chooses to be traumatized; no one should be shamed because an injustice continues to affect them.
Healing does not happen on command, and freedom from another person’s influence is rarely achieved through one decision.
Anger may also return in waves as we encounter new memories, consequences, or understandings; its return does not mean that all previous healing has been lost.
But we can begin noticing when anger is no longer protecting us.
- Is it helping us identify a necessary boundary—or keeping us mentally trapped in an argument that ended years ago?
- Is it moving us toward accountability and meaningful action—or convincing us that revenge is the only form of justice?
- Is it helping us protect ourselves from someone unsafe—or teaching us that nobody can ever be trusted?
- Is it honoring what was lost—or preventing us from seeing anything that remains?
There is a difference between remembering what happened so we can make wiser choices and reliving it so constantly that the past consumes the present.
There is also a difference between refusing to excuse wrongdoing and allowing the wrongdoer to become the center of our identity.
We do not betray ourselves by wanting freedom from what someone else did.
We do not declare the harm acceptable by deciding that it will not control every remaining part of our lives.
We do not owe our abusers permanent residence inside us simply because they once occupied so much space.
Anger may have helped us recognize the fire, escape the building, and protect ourselves from returning.
But we deserve more than spending the rest of our lives standing outside, staring only at what burned.
Eventually, when safety and capacity allow, anger can help us turn toward what comes next—not because the past did not matter, but because our future matters, too.
What Forgiveness Does—and Does Not—Require
Forgiveness is frequently presented as a simple moral command: forgive, forget, and move forward, but healing is rarely that simple.
Forgiveness should never be used to pressure someone into denying what happened, minimizing its consequences, or returning to a person who remains unsafe.
It does not require pretending the harm was an innocent misunderstanding when it was part of a repeated pattern.
It does not cancel the need for accountability, restitution, changed behavior, or appropriate consequences.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.
Forgiveness—however someone understands it—is an internal or spiritual process.
Reconciliation is relational; it requires participation from everyone involved: honesty about what happened, genuine accountability, respect for boundaries, sustained change, and the gradual rebuilding of trust.
One person cannot reconcile a relationship alone.
Someone may forgive and still decide that contact cannot safely resume.
They may release the desire for revenge without restoring trust.
They may wish another person healing from a distance while refusing to offer that person another opportunity to cause harm.
Forgiveness does not automatically restore a relationship, remove consequences, rebuild trust, or grant renewed access; it does not require the harmed person to stop telling the truth so that everyone else can become comfortable again.
Sometimes forgiveness is less about what we give the person who harmed us and more about what we stop requiring from them before we permit ourselves to live.
We may never receive the apology, explanation, accountability, or repair we deserve; if our peace depends entirely on another person finally understanding, changing, or suffering appropriately, we remain tied to choices we cannot control.
Releasing that expectation does not mean they were right.
It means our future no longer has to wait for their transformation.
At the same time, nobody should be forced to call this process forgiveness.
For some survivors, that word has been misused so often that it carries the weight of coercion.
They may understand healing as release, acceptance, detachment, grief, surrender, or simply refusing to keep organizing their lives around the person who harmed them.
The language matters less than the freedom.
Forgiveness should not become another performance demanded from wounded people to prove that they are kind, spiritual, mature, or healed; it cannot be genuine when it is extracted through guilt, fear, religious pressure, or the threat of social rejection.
A survivor does not owe anyone a reassuring display of forgiveness.
- They are allowed to remember.
- They are allowed to maintain boundaries.
- They are allowed to tell the truth.
- They are allowed to protect the life they are rebuilding.
Releasing someone from the center of our inner world does not require welcoming them back into our outer lives; we can stop carrying them everywhere without giving them another key to the door.
Perhaps forgiveness, at its healthiest, does not say: “What happened no longer matters.”
Perhaps it says: “What happened mattered deeply—but the person who harmed me will not be permitted to determine everything that happens inside me next.”
Jessica Carey
Humor Is Light, Not Erasure
Not every painful reality can be left behind.
Some circumstances remain with us. A chronic illness may not disappear.
A disability may shape daily life.
Trauma may leave lasting effects even after the danger has ended.
Grief may change form without vanishing completely.
In those situations, the question is not always: “How do I get rid of this?”
Sometimes it becomes: “How do I continue living while this is here?”
When Alan Alda spoke about Parkinson’s disease, he did not pretend that a positive attitude could cure it.
He acknowledged the reality: he has Parkinson’s, it frustrates him, and it is not simply going away.
Yet he also described using humor to keep the condition from holding him down or becoming the whole of who he is.
That is not denial.
It is not laughing because nothing hurts; it is finding a moment in which pain does not get the only voice.
Humor can create a small pocket of freedom inside circumstances we did not choose.
It can interrupt fear, release tension, restore perspective, or help us reconnect with other people.
Sometimes one absurd observation or shared laugh gives an overwhelmed nervous system enough breathing room to make it through the next hour.
Humor cannot cure every illness, undo trauma, remove injustice, pay a bill, create safe housing, or restore what someone has lost.
It should never be used to mock another person’s suffering or pressure them into appearing cheerful.
And when jokes become a way of avoiding every serious conversation, humor can become another form of hiding.
But honest humor does not erase reality; it exists beside it.
- We can laugh and still need help.
- We can find something funny during a terrible season and still acknowledge that the season is terrible.
- We can experience joy without betraying our grief.
- We can make a joke about something affecting us without giving other people permission to trivialize it.
The difference often lies in whether humor creates room for our humanity or demands that part of our humanity disappear.
There have been many times in my own life when humor, imagination, creativity, or noticing something unexpectedly beautiful helped me survive circumstances that remained profoundly painful.
Those moments did not prove that everything was secretly fine.
They did not cancel abuse, instability, disability, exhaustion, or grief.
They reminded me that those things were not the only realities present.
A terrible day may still contain one ridiculous moment.
A frightening season may still contain a kind person.
A life affected by trauma may still contain creativity, connection, wonder, and laughter.
None of those lights make the darkness imaginary. They simply keep darkness from becoming the entire landscape.
There is a meaningful difference between laughing instead of facing reality and laughing while facing it.
The first can become avoidance.
The second can become resilience.
Perhaps humor is not always a way out of the storm; sometimes it is the small light we carry while walking through it—a reminder that the storm may affect us deeply without becoming everything we are.
Toxic Positivity Versus Honest Hope
There is a difference between maintaining hope and being required to perform happiness.
Toxic positivity demands that we emphasize whatever appears good while minimizing everything painful, unjust, frightening, or unresolved.
It treats difficult emotions as evidence that we have the wrong attitude and honest descriptions of suffering as though they somehow create more suffering.
It may sound like:
- Stop focusing on the negative.
- Other people have it worse.
- Everything happens for a reason.
- Just choose happiness.
- You need to move on.
- Do not give the past so much power.
These statements may be offered with good intentions.
Sometimes people sincerely want to help but do not know how to sit beside pain they cannot solve.
Other times, positivity language becomes a way to protect people, families, organizations, or systems from the discomfort of accountability.
If the person naming the harm can be labeled negative, bitter, unforgiving, unstable, or trapped in a “victim mentality,” everyone else can avoid examining what happened.
The problem quietly shifts from the abuse to the person speaking about it.
But identifying suffering does not create it.
Naming abuse does not make someone responsible for the abuse.
Acknowledging that a person was victimized is not the same as declaring victimhood their entire identity.
And discussing the lasting effects of trauma does not mean someone has decided never to heal.
We cannot address what we are forbidden to name.
If a house is burning, saying that we should focus on the rooms that are not yet on fire will not protect the people inside.
Hope does not require us to admire the wallpaper while smoke fills the hallway.
Real hope helps us acknowledge the fire, call for help, find the exits, and believe that something can still be saved or rebuilt.
That is the difference between toxic positivity and honest hope.
Toxic positivity says: everything is fine.
Honest hope says: this is not fine, and that is why something needs to change.
Toxic positivity says: stop talking about what happened.
Honest hope says: the truth deserves to be heard, and the future can still become more than the past.
Toxic positivity says: your attitude is the problem.
Honest hope recognizes that perspective matters—but so do safety, resources, accommodations, accountability, and support.
Toxic positivity demands an appearance of wellness while honest hope makes room for the complicated process of becoming well.
I can speak plainly about the horrors people have inflicted upon me and still believe my life contains goodness.
I can acknowledge that those experiences changed me without believing they have final authority over who I become.
I can grieve what I lost while remaining curious about what I may still find and create.
Those truths do not cancel one another.
In fact, my ability to remain hopeful means more—not less—because it exists alongside an honest understanding of what I have survived.
Hope that depends on denying reality is fragile; it can survive only while nobody tells the whole truth.
Honest hope is stronger; it can look directly at grief, injustice, disability, trauma, and uncertainty without insisting that they are imaginary.
It does not promise that everything will become easy or that every loss will be restored.
It simply refuses to conclude that pain is the only thing that will ever be true.
Perhaps positivity is not saying: “Everything is awesome,” when it clearly is not.
Perhaps it is saying: “I will tell the truth about what happened—and I will not allow what happened to convince me that no other truth is still possible.”
Human experience rarely fits into either-or categories.
We can be grieving and healing, angry and responsible, exhausted and determined, wounded and hopeful.
These truths do not invalidate one another; they reveal the complexity of being human.
Jessica Carey
What We Choose to Carry
We do not choose every burden that enters our lives.
We do not choose every diagnosis, injustice, loss, betrayal, limitation, or frightening season.
We do not always choose our immediate emotional response, either.
Anger, grief, fear, and frustration may arrive before we have time to decide what we think about them.
Mentality does not give us absolute control over reality.
But over time—and often with safety, support, and considerable effort—we may gain some choice in how we carry what happened.
- We can decide whether anger becomes information or identity.
- We can decide whether another person’s cruelty determines the kind of person we become.
- We can decide whether humor helps us breathe without using it to hide every wound.
- We can decide whether hope requires dishonesty.
- We can decide that our past will remain part of our story without becoming the author of everything that comes next.
Immaculée Ilibagiza’s words remind me that carrying permanent hatred can keep us bound to the people who harmed us.
Alan Alda’s approach reminds me that acknowledging an unchangeable reality does not prevent us from finding humor, meaning, connection, or moments of light within it.
Neither perspective asks us to pretend.
One invites us to loosen the hold of what has already happened; the other shows us how to live alongside something that remains.
Both suggest that suffering can be real without receiving ownership of the entire self.
I will not call darkness light merely to make other people comfortable.
I will not describe abuse as love, erase disability to appear capable, or pretend that painful circumstances have no consequences.
I will name what happened, grieve what was lost, protect what remains, and seek whatever healing, justice, support, and change may still be possible.
But I also do not want those who harmed me to determine the full meaning of my life.
I do not want their behavior to make me cruel.
I do not want their inability to love well to convince me that genuine love does not exist.
I do not want the years spent surviving to prevent me from discovering what it means to live.
The truth about my suffering is not the only truth about me.
I am also the person who survived it.
I am the person still creating, questioning, laughing, caring, learning, and imagining a different future.
Perhaps this is what honest hope looks like: neither denying the weight nor surrendering our entire lives to it.
We acknowledge what we carry.
We ask whether every part of it still belongs to us.
We set down what we safely can, seek help with what is too heavy to hold alone, and make room for whatever goodness may travel beside it.
My past deserves truth.
My present deserves compassion.
And my future deserves the freedom to become more than either one.
Jessica Carey
Want even more content about creativity and art?
Be sure to check out all of our creative chronicles!
If you'd like to see examples of my work, you can find some of my art and creations at Redbubble and Gumroad!
Looking to learn more about my recent journey?
Check out some of these articles:
-Hidden Gems for St. Louis Artists
-Hidden Gems for Autistic & Neurodivergent Adults
-Learning What Love Was Supposed to Feel Like
-I Wasn't Broken--I'm Burned Out
-What Chronic Autistic Burnout Actually Feels Like
-Building a Life from What Remains
Jessica Carey
