“I understand that you’re loving me the only way you know how, but the way that you love me is toxic for me. You’re toxic for me.”
That’s a direct quote from the breakup I went through a year ago, and those words play over in my mind more often than I’d like to admit. “Toxic,” he said, and instantly I labeled myself the same way you’d label radioactive waste or black mold.
I don’t know if you’ve read the articles “Toxic people: 12 things to do and how to deal with them” or “How emotionally intelligent people handle toxic people,” or even “10 toxic people you should avoid at all costs,” but if you’re considering reading them, don’t. Google the definition of “toxic” and it just says “poisonous.”
Calling a person toxic or poisonous is obviously hurtful. But we do it anyway, and we should stop. These days there are so many headlines referring to people as toxic that you’d think everybody was listening to Britney Spears.
I’ve fought a hard fight against depression for years. I’m proof of how depression can rob a person of motivation, compassion, or the ability to be a good friend, but I’m also proof that doesn’t make me unlovable. Sure, there are good days. There are also days when I’ll sit in the shower and balance a razor blade on my fingers, wondering if my skin could split the way that he did. I’ll make plans I’m excited about, and come Thursday at 6 p.m. I still haven’t gotten out of bed. My mind is warped. I fight a battle every day, and sometimes I lose. I don’t think this makes me toxic, though maybe certain people aren’t equipped to handle my sadness. Hell, I’ve been with myself for 22 years, and even I sometimes forget how to handle it.
One of my favorite slam poets, Brenna Twohy, has a poem about loving her through her anxiety called “Anxiety: A Ghost Story,” which I saw her perform at the National Poetry Slam in 2015. My favorite part goes, “To love me / is to love a haunted house— / It’s fun to visit once a year / but no one wants to live there.” And when she says, “Darling, / this love will not cure me. / And this love will not scrape / the blood from the baseboards, / but it will turn all the lights on,” I can see hope for myself. So instead of throwing eggs at the doors or daring the neighborhood kids to ring the doorbell and run, maybe we just need to turn the lights on for people.
When you call someone “toxic,” especially someone with a mental illness, you’re cutting the power to their breaker box. No matter how many times they flip the light switch, they’ll be left in darkness. Imagine stumbling through an unfamiliar dark room with no way of knowing where the door is. When someone voluntarily walks out of our life, we become an abandoned house. Over time, our foundation begins to crumble, our hinges creak, and parts of us need major repairs. By calling someone toxic, we are quickening the decay of their soul.
The word “toxic” is a comfortable shortcut. It’s an attempt to shift the blame away from ourselves when we find that we’re in miserable relationships. Instead of taking some accountability for the imperfect things we do, we count the flaws and imperfections of our partners until we find an excuse to leave them behind. But every time we point fingers at others, we are giving away our own responsibility. Instead of accepting that our misery could stem from absolutely anything else, we blame other people for allowing the life to be sucked out of us. We label people as a hazard without considering the selfishness behind our accusations.
Sometimes people are going to treat me poorly. Sometimes I’m going to treat people poorly. But I have the choice to label behaviors instead of people. Someone might manipulate me, but that doesn’t make them manipulative. Someone might go out of their way to hurt me, but that doesn’t make them a villain. If I don’t want to be labeled as toxic, I have to stop labeling people that way, too. I need to stop buying in to trending articles and the lies they are telling me. Mold is toxic; people are human.
