When Hope is Hard
Hope can be really hard. Why don’t we talk about this more? Why is the word ‘hope’ thrown around like it’s a fix-all for everything?
Hope you feel better. Hope you’re having a great day. Hope this job is enough to pay the bills. Hope he doesn’t lie to me. Hope my relationship with my kid gets better. Hope my car doesn’t break down on the trip. Hope I get to go on a real vacay next year. Hope covid doesn’t shut down schools again. Hope McDonald’s ice cream machine isn’t broken today (there’s no hope for that y’all, just let it go…….let it go).
Hope is hard. Truly. It’s HARD. And we talk about hope like it’s magic fairy dust. Hope is the acknowledgement that we don’t know. We don’t know how things are going to turn out. We don’t know what it’s going to be like. We don’t know what they are going do or are not going to do. To hope is to be vulnerable and open to the future. Hope is putting yourself out there just in case things go the way you want them to. Hope is allowing yourself to get excited about the best possible outcome. Hope tears down walls and breaks down barriers. But there are no guarantees in hope, that’s kinda the point.
Someone recently said to me that they didn’t want to want something. Stay with me on this… she really does want something. But she doesn’t want to want it. Cause what if it doesn’t happen? What if it doesn’t play out to her favor? What then? This got me thinking - why is that worse? Why is that actually harder to hope? That means she had to acknowledge that she actually wanted it. It’s so much easier to be like “Nah, I could’ve cared less about that job” than to say “Yeah, that was going to be a huge stepping stone for me in my career and it sucks that I didn’t get it”. We like our walls, we like our safety and protection. Being vulnerable, being open to disappointment and failure and hurt is so much harder. It’s human to want to avoid those things, but those things are part of the core of what makes us human. We build up bravado to act like those things don’t touch us, but on the inside, we all know they really do. We’ve just learned to be good actors.
Let me be raw with you - one hope that scares the s*** out of me is the hope that my cancer doesn’t come back. Inflammatory breast cancer is a real bitch. I’m not even going to star out that word, cause it really is. I had stage 3 IBC and my stats for survival are 50%. In 4 years, I have a 50% chance of being alive. I hope that I am. I hope that it doesn’t come back. I hope I live a really long life and grow to see my son turn 70. I hope IBC is behind me. But I’d be lying if I said there isn’t this little “But what if it does come back?” lingering in my head. So what do I choose? Am I ignoring truth if I hope that I live longer? Am I a fool for thinking I could? Am I too much of a dreamer to say I feel fairly confident that I will live a long life? There are those that believe that we can manifest our reality with our thoughts and words.
But here’s the bottom line…. it’s scary to hope. It’s hard to face the truth, but it’s even harder to hope for better. And our fear doesn’t come from what if what we want happens, our fear comes from what if it doesn’t. That disappointment is enough for us to wish that we didn’t even want the want. So here’s my encouragement to you - embrace disappointment. Face it head on. It freaking sucks when things don’t go the way we want them to. When we put our whole heart into hoping. But living with a stone wall around your dreams is even worse. Being a robot in a world that desperately needs more humanity is a step in the wrong direction for you, your kids, your friends, and the world. Practice hope. Every day put a little bit of reckless hope into your life. Who cares if it disappoints, your heart was alive!! It was brimming with emotion and life and excitement - we live for that stuff. Step away from the robotic monotony of safety and step into a space of hope, joy, risk, and reward. The world suffers when you surround your hopes and dreams in a stone tower and hide it away from the rest of us.
Along those lines, I hope against hope that Jason Momoa reads this and comments and makes my day. Hey, don’t hate, a girl can hope.
