I knew this would be the hardest essay to write. I also knew it was the one I needed to begin this newsletter with.
When hope is lost, you feel its absence right away. It’s an embodied experience; you wake up feeling hollowed out. You look at the hours ahead, not so much with dread as with a cold and helpless indifference.
Why do I have to get up? Why do I have to speak to my neighbor? Why do I have to go to work? Why do I have to do anything?
It’s the sensation that what you do now will not mean anything later.
This is why hopelessness is a defining characteristic of depression—it’s underpinned by a perception of powerlessness that forecloses the possibility for action. To act from a site of hopelessness is to not just to push a boulder up a mountain knowing the boulder will fall, it’s to believe the boulder won’t move at all.
Why do anything if the outcome is inevitable, predestined?
We might wish for the impossible. But we hope only for what we believe can happen. Hope is always about the future. You don’t hope that something will have happened yesterday—not in the English language.
To hope is to be invested in the future, to believe you have some connection, some responsibility to it. That it has something to do with you.
What does it say when we lose it then? That we’re no longer looking forward with the same commitment to what comes next. This is a dangerous place to be when what comes next relies on what comes before, what comes now.
Hopelessness is giving up before the future has been settled—and when the future is forever, settling into any fixed outcome will always be premature.
Hope isn’t solitary, it’s something we share. Look at the glut of motivational speakers, self-help gurus, the influence of pastors, preachers, religion.
People are and will always be hungry for hope. But when we hope, we also come into contact with our most vulnerable self because to hope, truly, is to risk being wrong about that which we deeply want.
The battle is what it takes to keep it, what it asks of us. We must borrow a childish wonder in a story whose ending we think we’ve seen before.
Even when a child has heard the same story a million times, they still laugh along, still scream with rage, are willing, open, to hear it one more time.
They are alert and invested in it until the very end.
