| In all honesty, I will admit that I have always been the kind of person who lives with a massive amount of hope. I’ve lived my life in a state where I’ve always truly believed that things can and will get better, in spite of the fact that the reality of my childhood was one of constant pain and anguish. I lived a life of pretty much perpetual rejection, isolation, chronic pain and illness and a reflection from the world that I was shitty and guilty and undeserving of love and support. But even through all of that,there was always this part of me that hoped for a better future - one where I would be healthy, one where I would be loved and understood and one where I would be safe to be and express myself. I hoped for better for my friends - even as they rejected and ridiculed me, I could always see the pain behind their actions and wanted so much to love them into a state of safety so that they could feel better. There was this part of me that always existed, that knew that if we were willing to put our boots on the ground and work towards something - a new 'something' could exist. I really believed that there was a way forward in this life if we were just willing to ‘figure things out.’ At the same time, I had massive hope in others. In life itself - I continually held in my mind the possibility of circumstances changing, of people making different choices - the hope that one day I would meet a group of friends who would actually like me, the hope that one day I would be able to move or find a new life in a new location, the hope that the reality of my body would shift dramatically as I slept at night - allowing me to wake the next day in a totally new reality. I held onto the vision of something better like a child clutching their favorite stuffed animal - it was my safety, my security and my refuge as I lay in bed, night after night, pillow soaked in lonely tears.And you know what? This hope that I had, this vision for a better future, this belief that things could and WOULD get better DID crush me. Many, many times. I can't tell you how many times I woke up to realize that that loving group of friends I had dreamed about all night weren’t actually there and felt like I was going to die. How many times the reality of my sick body stopped me from being able to dance or socialize the way I wanted to juxtaposed the vision I had had for myself and how debilitating that was. How many times I cried myself to sleep over dashed hopes and dreams. Reality being harsh was incredibly painful in contrast to that yearning for better. It hurt me. Over and over again it hurt. It would have been SO much easier to accept reality and to assume that life wasn’t going to get better. It would have hurt - in the short run anyway - a lot less if I had simply owned the idea that my life was going to be filled with pain and isolation, I could have shielded myself from a lot of the pain I experienced. I could have stopped hoping, stopped dreaming and simply let myself settle into the reality and I could have developed all kinds of coping mechanisms to live with and deal with the pain. That would have been the more logical step to take for sure. However, for me what holding onto hope actually did was drive me to figure out steps. Hope was the mechanism by which I learned to stare my struggles, pain and fears in the face, and rather than surrendering, giving in, giving up or allowing myself to succumb to the tragedy of it all, I learned to make a plan. I learned to look for solutions. I learned to take risks, to try, to see if I could CREATE the visions I had for better via my actions. As I grew from child into adulthood, what my hope for a better future did for me, was it gave me the strength to work THROUGH heart-break and heart-ache. It gave me the capacity to see myself through the disappointment of life not going how I thought it would go - and I believe this is what gave me the capacity to actually change my life. Hope Creating Steps What I started to realize as I grew older, was that not everything that was happening to me, was happening to me for no reason. Because I had kept myself open to the possibility of better, I had allowed myself to inadvertently ‘study’ the mechanics of what seemed to be ‘working’ for others and for myself, and what didn’t seem to be working. The hope I carried around with me left me vulnerable because it left my mind and my heart open to alternative options. This openness led to a capacity to see that others were having a different experience than I was, leading to me believing even more that it was possible for me. Which led me to understanding that others were DOING things differently than I was. Hope turned into observation of reality. It turned into my ability to weigh cause and effect, which led me to noticing the patterns of my caregivers and other authority figures and the results they were getting in their lives - and by extension the results I was getting in mine - as well as noticing the patterns of people who seemed to be having a different experience. This observation eventually led me to a whole slew of ‘radical’ seeming choices - I changed my diet, changed how I moved my body, changed my religion, changed my career trajectory, changed my physical location, got into therapy - this all took place over decades of course - but the long and short of it is that due to the fact that I had kept myself OPEN through HOPE, I was then able to stay OPEN to the idea that life could get better if I was willing to work at it. I learned through this that if I was willing to take STEPS - that I could make change. I learned to let go of my childhood dreams of life radically shifting overnight, and instead was able to settle into the truth that making incremental changes, slowly and over time, could and would lead to radical changes eventually. What’s more, again the emotional resilience that hope had required I develop gave me the capacity to try things and fail, to take steps that took me in directions I didn’t expect, to be disappointed and shown that what I thought was going to ‘work’ didn’t - and rather than taking any of this as a sign that I couldn’t have what I wanted or that change wasn’t possible - I was able to see it just as another step on the path. Something to learn from. I was able to face the pain of disappointment, as well as the very real reality that taking steps towards a destination you’ve never been to is going to mean failure, set-backs and no guarantees - and I was able to stay the course. I was willing to risk looking stupid. I was willing to fail and learn instead of giving up. I was willing to say ‘ok that step didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean there’s NO way or NO step - I just have to keep looking.’ The hope that I had kept me open, kept me trying, kept me seeking - and this is exactly what gave me the power to become what I’ve become and to create what I’ve created - a life that is pretty radically different from the life I used to live. Hope hurt, but it made me strong. It didn’t weaken me as many people believe that it does. Rather it fortified me. It kept me open, it kept me searching and it gave me the capacity to try, to fail, and to learn and keep going rather than giving up or assuming there was no way. I have learned so much about life, myself and reality because I kept hope alive. Hope is the thing that allowed me to change my life. Hope turned into pain yes - but that pain taught me to be strong. Hope turned into action. It taught me to seek solutions, steps and guidance - and to be willing to take the risk of trying even though failure was always an option - and happened many times. Hope allowed me to keep my mind open, and it was that openness that led to me being able to figure out the steps that I needed to take. Hope allowed me to learn from the steps I was taking, to learn from both what did and didn’t work in terms of what moved the needle of my life experience to something that felt better - and this was truly invaluable in terms of helping me craft a new reality for myself. Hope kept me open to FEELING. Staying hopeful meant staying connected to my body and my emotions - and this actually turned out to be a massive piece of the puzzle in terms of finding my way forward. My logic wasn’t always able to figure out the way. My mind only knew what it had already experienced. Hope kept me connected to how I wanted to FEEL. It kept me open to how the choices I was making and circumstances I was in were affecting me. Not only on the surface level but on those deeper layers of my being. Staying connected to feeling helped me navigate what was and wasn’t working because I had the ability to sense what did and didn’t feel RIGHT. FEELING and HOPE are deeply connected - and finding our way forward on a path we’ve never walked before is ALL about learning to feel - to feel deeply and to notice what is and isn’t working in real reality - even when the mind is convinced of something, the body will always correct us. Hope made me vulnerable to heartache and heartbreak - and it taught me how to recover. What I’ve Witnessed In Those Who Don’t Have Hope The biggest thing I’ve learned with regards to hope is this - when we don’t have it, when we assume the worst, when we allow ourselves to die to the idea that life can and will get better - in a lot of ways we don’t actually protect ourselves from pain and we don’t actually create a better reality for ourselves. What actually ends up happening is we close ourselves off to any possibility of a better future. When we give up on hope, there is the short-term relief and sense that we are protecting ourselves from the sting of being let down, disappointed and from having to process the pain of life being more painful than we expected it to be. But in the long run, it actually becomes a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. What I’ve witnessed in those who don’t have hope, is that in a lot of ways they unknowingly and unintentionally become participants in their own suffering and pain. Now, this is NOT to say that we are the absolute arbiters of our own reality and that what we experience comes directly from our choices and nothing else. Not at all. Many of us are suffering for reasons that have nothing to do with what we’ve chosen - we were born into families that harmed us, societal systems that exploit us, bodies that experience pain and suffering, we are affected by the choices of people around us - life happens and our experience of pain and pleasure is complex and multifaceted. Thus I would never want to come across as though I’m saying those who don’t have hope are creating their own pain. Rather, what I WILL say is that when we don’t have hope, when we accept that painful situations are what they are and are totally outside of our control, when we say we have no power or capacity to make anything better and we shut ourselves off from hope completely - we make it nearly impossible for better to exist. We shut ourselves off from being able to dream about a better future, we shut ourselves off from being able to observe that there are other ways of life, and we shut ourselves off from being able to see that there may be steps that we CAN take that will lead towards BETTER. Maybe not perfect, maybe not the ultimate outcome we would want if we could have exactly what we wanted - but something that isn’t as bad or painful as what we have now. We also shut ourselves off from developing the ability and capacity to see ourselves through disappointment and heart-ache. We block our own growth in this way, leading to a situation where when we DO try to take steps and those steps don’t work out, we are far more likely to give up and thus stay where we are. When we don’t allow ourselves to have hope, on a level, we DO trap ourselves in our current conditions. We create a situation where even if better is possible, we can’t see it and thus we can’t take steps towards it. We create a situation where we don’t have the emotional and mental fortitude to do what it takes to transform our realities - and to transform the world around us through steps and actions that call for a better society. When we give up on hope, we surrender to what is. Because in most cases, life doesn’t change until we change. Patterns don’t shift until we shift them. Better doesn’t just appear - we have to create it. We have to build it. And in order to create and build it, we have to take steps, we have to have vision, we have to be able to fail and keep going, we have to be able to learn and we have to be able to hold to the path even when the path is hard and messy and confusing. Without hope there can be no vision. Without a vision there can be no plan. Without a plan there can be no steps. WIthout steps there can be no change. Without hope there can be no emotional resilience. Without emotional resilience there can be no transformation. One has to be incredibly resilient to live a life of hope. You can't be calloused and you can't build a skin of protection around yourself - because you have to be soft enough to feel. You have to be soft enough to feel your way forward, to be vulnerable, to figure out steps and to hold yourself when it all goes wrong - without giving up and in order to find a NEW path when all the ones you knew of have dried up. Hope is the medicine that creates the path. Hope makes us real. It hurts sometimes, but it also leads to the possibility of true joy and transformation. It's deeply vulnerable, and deeply rewarding - like the velveteen rabbit, it makes you real. <3 Want more tools like this? Check out The Mystery School Here |
