Hope
Hope is a funny thing, isn’t it? Like so many other things—motivation, mood, desire—it can fluctuate significantly. You can wake up one morning full of hope, and wake up the next morning feeling deflated and frustrated, having trouble remembering what hope even feels like. Hopefulness can vary from one person to other depending on a variety of factors, including our personalities, our value systems, our support systems, our level of resiliency, our circumstances and life experiences, our identities and levels of privilege (particularly if we hold marginalized identities and often face oppression), and our susceptibility to mental health concerns like depression, anxiety, and eating disorders (to name just a few).
If you’re someone who struggles to have hope sometimes, please be gentle with yourself—you are not wrong, or broken, or bad for the way that you feel, and there is no moral obligation to be an optimistic or hopeful kind of person. I think it is important, though, to try and surround yourself with people who can hold hope for you when you don’t have much. I’m not talking about people who brush off your struggles, or offer toxic positivity—I mean people who know you, who can see your true potential when you have trouble seeing it yourself, and can remind you of it. This could be a family member, a friend, a partner, a therapist—even a stranger on the internet whose words resonate with you. Because we need both kinds of people, right—people who can sit with us in the dark times, witnessing our pain and struggle, and also people who will try to pull us out of our darkness when it gets to be too much. It’s not always the same people who can do both—and I personally think we need both kinds of people in our lives.
Leaning into these messages of hope and this type of support does require some trust on your part—trust that can be hard to foster in the beginning, if you are not used to sharing your struggles with others—but connection is powerful and so worth the work to create it. If you’re feeling less hopeful today, I see you and I’m holding hope for you—until you have more again yourself.
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please go to your nearest emergency room, or contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.