You asked for advice, so here it is: first thing for you to do is to stop trying to find a solution to suffering, stop looking for a way out- for the rest of 2021. For the rest of this year, give zero thought to ending your suffering, completely remove your attention from this topic. Do this today,  let me know how it feels for you, and we’ll take it from there (one step at a time).

For what its worth I think that’s good advice from Anita.

There was a time in my life when I felt similar to what you talk about.  Like you I got discouraged when people  suggested I be more positive. The ‘think positive’ advice, as a defensive pessimist I wasn’t built that way and that wasn’t going to change. I was not going to be able to change my thinking by replacing it with ‘positive thinking’. Then it occurred to me. What if I just left the space blank. That to my surprise I was able to do. I changed the stories I was constantly repeating to myself with no story. A kind of mindfulness I guess thought didn’t know it at the time. When the negative stories came, I didn’t try to change them but more important in time I found I didn’t have to dwell on them. Its difficult to describe.

I shared some of T.S Eliot’s pomes before. I repeat this to myself when I find myself filling the space of my self talk unskillfully

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing”  – I discovered as you mentioned that like toxic positivity, hope is a double edged sword, to easily done unskillfully.  Better not to hope then hope unskillfully.  It is important to say that this is not hopelessness.

“wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;” I was very naïve and didn’t have a great relationship with the ‘idea of Love’. Not having to fill a time of waiting with unskillful stories of ‘Love’ turned out to be very freeing.

“there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting“. That the  waiting becomes the faith and love??? I love that.  Challenged me to re-evaluate my relationship with faith and love. *

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:” How very true for me at the time. Wait without filling the space with stories, negative or positive.  I live in my head so was very surprised to discover it was possible. Those moments when I let thoughts go…

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The problem of opposites. A change in perspective, the possibility that one can be detached and engaged, still while dancing! Find that the way out of our suffering isn’t the light but first the darkness, isn’t up but going down. A experience discovered in the waiting..

* Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. – Jung

Waiting becomes trust becomes a experience one can lean into.

“If you think you imagine yourself taking the position of esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvana, the still point in the mist of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.”

Still

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden

But then what our our illusions? Choice? Skillful or unskillful choice?