Let me be the first to say that I’ve also been that toxic person. Calling myself out on my own toxicity is what aids me in spotting it in others. Healing my toxicity is what helped me understand myself. Now, I invite and embrace peace & good vibes only.

Sanjo Jendayi

I love this quote. It recognises that we are not perfect, we have our moments. But it also points out that it’s not those moments that define us, it’s how we acknowledge them and respond to them that make us the person we ultimately become.

These days I’m a fairly optimistic person – I try to look for and find the best in every day. That’s not to say that I’m perfect in holding that vision 24/7/365 – far from it. But it is something I try to live as much as I can. In truth, I find the constant drag of living a life constantly expecting the worst – in places, experiences and people – tiring. And it’s also not much of a life.

I tend to ignore those issues that don’t affect me, which as I get older I’m finding actually constitute less and less. That is to say, with greater responsibility as an adult, parent, and son of my ageing parents comes more and more issues that I begin to care about. Seniors care, for one example, I really didn’t give much of a thought until recently when my father’s health started to decline and his (and my own) mortality started to stare me down.

Over the last few years I’ve begun to think about toxicity in society – in relationships as much as in general societal attitudes. I’ve also begun actively removing myself from occasions where relentless negativity has an affect on my own mental health. This has, inevitably, led to a refocus on friendships and relationships in which I derive positive benefit, and excluding those that don’t.

At first glance, that might sound an odd concept – shouldn’t all friendships and relationships be positive? Well, yes, in theory that’s exactly what one should expect. However, humans don’t quite work that way, and we’ve all been there. We’ve all had the friend who is constantly negative, argumentative and by having them as friends is in reality a drag on your own mental health. Over the last few years, I’ve cut them out where I could. My Facebook friends (obviously not the greatest metric to measure such things) has gone from 300-odd in 2016 to around 60 in 2022.

That might seem like a harsh cull.

Since May of 2020, I’ve been on anti-anxiety medication. Ironically, my first day on that medication was the day after I got made redundant from a job I’d held for four years, and in the middle of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a tough few days to say the least. Looking back now, I believe the redundancy was the best thing to happen to me, but at the time it felt like the entire world was closing in on me. Once the fog from those first weeks on the meds had lifted, I became resolved to never feeling that way again.

We moved to the Hunter Valley in 2016 to accept this job, leaving friends and family behind for the adventure that awaited us – a young family stretching out and ostensibly ‘living the dream’ of escaping the rat race for something more subdued. Whereas in Canberra I had a core of friends that I could call on to go for a beer down the pub at short notice, in the Hunter my ‘friends’ group was essentially an extension of my work network, or other parents at the school.

Six years down the track, and I can honestly say I don’t have a single friend up in the Hunter Valley that I would look on as on par with the friendships I left behind in the bush capital.

There are reasons for this of course, and most of them my own making. Despite my outward appearance, I am naturally introverted. Get me talking about anything I’m remotely passionate about and you would find that statement very hard to believe, but in truth I struggle in social situations most of the time and especially in the Hunter. I don’t suffer fools well and, as elitist as I’m aware this sounds, if someone isn’t on my level intellectually I struggle with maintaining a conversation with them. So I tend to keep to myself a lot. Plus the politics of country towns is a little more to the right than my progressive upbringing can tolerate at the best of times – at the 2019 Federal Election, the One Nation candidate got over 20% of the primary vote; one of, if not the, largest primary votes for them in the state.

Fifty percent of adults here did not complete high school (the highest percentage in the state), most leaving at 15 to go work in the mines or associated industries. Eighty-five percent were born in Australia, and once you add up all the various Australian/Western Europe ancestry you get an overwhelming white, anglo-centric population – less than 5% are immigrants from non-Western European background and around 5% of the population recognise as Indigenous. Diversity is not home in this part of the country.

As a result, I don’t have friends and tend to keep to myself, so those old friendships tend to matter more to me than they would perhaps for most.

Being self-aware of my own failings has made me aware of what to look for in others. I can be like a dog with a bone when debating something I feel passionately about. I’m sure some people construe that with my own version of toxicity. I’m sure there are relationships out there that people have seen me as a toxic influence. And I’m ok with that. I try to improve myself, and have tried to be more empathetic over time, but sometimes I just fail. Again, that’s ok – so long as I recognise it, and learn from it.

Which is why I find the process of removing toxicity from my life when I see it in others, by and large, a fairly simple process. My thinking is straightforward – if a friendship or relationship is not enriching my life, and in fact, doing the opposite, I do not engage in that relationship. How that plays out is either by muting the person on social media, screening phone calls, or (at its zenith) removing that person from my life altogether.

What I get is a curated set of relationships that help me become a better person, and gives me a much more optimistic outlook on life. It’s not foolproof, and there are always some relationships that are hard to cull than others (family being the obvious example), but sometimes the hard decisions need to be made in order for you to be happy. And after all, isn’t this what it is all about?

I enjoy debate but hate argument. Debate is where people are involved in a discussion, where different points of view are put forward, and a consensus may ultimately be met. An argument, in my mind, is a pointless exercise where people who have no thought of entertaining an alternative viewpoint yell at each other until one of them goes off in a huff.

Fuck. That.

I’ve had my fair share of both over the years. The worst is when you believe you’re in a debate, but in reality the other person just wants to be told they’re right. This, to me, is a toxic relationship. This becomes obvious when the other person starts a sentence with the word, “No”. That finality that says ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ is the ultimate pointer that if this was a debate earlier on, it is no longer that now.

I’ve been guilty of that in the past. I’m trying to be less guilty of this now. But as soon as I hear that word, it signals to me that I need to re-evaluate my relationship with this person. Not because they have a response that is different to mine, but they way they present that belief is that of a bully. And I have no tolerance for bullies.

Empathy, self-awareness, and gratitude are the keys to a happy life, and I have only just started to understand this. There’s enough toxicity in the world, I don’t need more of it in my life.

I will come back to this essay (well, more of a rant, really) in due course as I continue to learn and grow.