Just days after my newborn daughter came home from the NICU, I got the call: The lump I first felt when I was 38 weeks pregnant, that had been dismissed as a clogged milk duct, was malignant “after all.”
I was 31 years old, recovering from a C-section, and trying to care for a newborn and toddler, when I learned I had an aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. I knew my life would be different after the baby arrived, but I never imagined such a curveball that would split my life in two. There was the version of me from before that phone call, and then there was the woman staring at a future full of chemotherapy, surgeries, and fear.
In those early days, one well-intentioned message kept finding me: Stay positive.
I understood what people meant. They were trying to comfort me. They wanted to give me hope when nothing felt steady. But often, that encouragement landed as pressure instead of relief. It made me feel as though I was supposed to rise above the terror I was feeling before I had even had a chance to absorb what was happening.
Because the truth was, I was terrified.
I was grieving the loss of the postpartum season I thought I would have. I was angry that after a traumatic delivery and days of uncertainty about my baby’s health, I now had to process unanticipated news about my own health that would alter the rest of my life. I was overwhelmed by the speed with which my world had narrowed into scans, pathology, consultations, treatment options, and impossible decisions.
What I did not need was to be coached out of those feelings. I needed permission to have them.
In the framework I later came to call the Path of Least Regret, that is where the journey begins: giving ourselves permission to feel. Before clarity, before decision-making, before grounded hope, there has to be honesty. We cannot navigate a hard reality well if we are denying how hard it feels.
That is what toxic positivity gets wrong. It mistakes emotional honesty for emotional failure. It suggests that fear, sadness, anger, or despair are dangerous states to move past quickly rather than natural responses to crisis.
No amount of competence could erase the helplessness of hair loss, the fear of treatment, or the grief of realizing that this chapter of motherhood would now be marked by medical trauma.
And for patients, that can be deeply isolating.
Cancer is already disorienting. Toxic positivity adds another burden by implying that if you are struggling emotionally, you are somehow doing your illness wrong. It can make patients feel they have to endure what is happening to them, and do so in a way that’s reassuring to everyone else.
So many people facing cancer learn to perform steadiness before they actually feel it. They say, “I’m fine,” when they're unraveling. They smile to make other people less uncomfortable. They rush to talk about lessons and silver linings before they have even had time to metabolize the loss. They confuse hope with emotional suppression.
I felt that pull myself. Part of me wanted to approach my diagnosis the way I had approached so much else in life: gather information, make a plan, stay composed, keep moving. But cancer is not a problem you solve your way out of logically. No amount of competence could erase the helplessness of hair loss, the fear of treatment, or the grief of realizing that this chapter of motherhood would now be marked by medical trauma instead of the presence and joy I had imagined.
And yet so much of the cultural messaging around illness nudges us toward uplift. Especially as women, especially as mothers, we are often encouraged to stay strong, stay grateful, stay inspiring. As if our role is not only to survive, but to make the experience feel meaningful and manageable for everyone around us.
What actually helped me was something much less shiny and much more human.
It helped when people let me say, “This is awful,” without immediately trying to redirect me to what was still good. It helped when people sat with me in uncertainty instead of trying to solve it.
It helped when someone asked, “What feels hardest today?” instead of offering a slogan. It helped when support was concrete: meals, childcare, transportation, presence.
Most of all, it helped when I began to understand that there is a meaningful difference between toxic positivity and grounded hope.
Toxic positivity denies reality. Grounded hope starts by telling the truth about reality and then asks whether something life-giving is still possible inside it.
That distinction mattered enormously to me. Grounded hope did not ask me to pretend I wasn’t scared. It did not require me to believe everything would work out exactly as I wanted. It did not ask me to leap prematurely to gratitude or meaning.
Instead, it asked something quieter and sturdier: Can you face what is true without letting fear become the only truth?
That was the kind of hope I could actually use.
It allowed me to say: I have cancer. I do not control the outcome. I am frightened. This is unfair. And still, I can take the next step. I can make the next decision. I can stay rooted in reality without surrendering to despair.
Patients do not need to be managed into positivity. They need to feel safe enough to be real. They need room for fear, sadness, anger, numbness, ambivalence — all of it. They need people who understand that hope is not the absence of hard emotion. It is the refusal to let hard emotion have the final word.
If someone you love is facing cancer, resist the urge to wrap their pain in a bow. Instead of saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” try saying, “This is really hard.” Instead of “Stay positive,” try, “I’m holding space for everything you’re feeling right now.” Instead of focusing on the bright side, ask, “What would feel supportive right now?”
That is the kind of care I remember most: the people who made room for the truth, and in doing so, made room for hope.
Parul Somani is an MIT- and Harvard Business School-trained strategist, keynote speaker, and mindset coach who helps people live a resilient life of intention and meaning. She is the bestselling author of the newly released book The Path of Least Regret, which takes readers through her actionable framework for making confident decisions in uncertain times.
