When Hope Was a Four Letter Word
a hard truth from an earlier time in my recovery
“Hope for the best.”
I have heard this phrase… so many times. It’s a perennial favorite for people who do not have demons. On the surface, that sentiment is quite simple, the desire for the best possible outcome to turn into the actual end result. It gets us through tough times — illness, trouble, emotional hardship, separation. It holds us to our beautifully innate sense of idealism.
As a species, we build our lives around this idea that everything can be all right; that, truly, we can be happy. It lives on despite death, destruction, war, desperation.
But hope can also be dangerous.
It can hurt.
It can be deadly.
There is a moment, often so tiny and quick as to be unidentifiable by hindsight, when that gift for idealizing life begins to turn against us. When the possibility of a better future is too overwhelming, when it is unbearable in the face of our personal present. When the dream of beauty is a knife that slides through us slowly, slowly, as we try to sort out the agony of right now.
Hope can seem like an enemy, then, a shadow flitting from tree to tree in the forest. We run after it and can never catch up. We begin to hate it. Then we fear it. And that is when the switch gets flipped.
I’ve been there before.
The first time, that fear of hope led to me turning my back against God. The litanies of prayers that I whispered, that I cried, that I screamed into my pillow went unanswered on all fronts. I was left clinging to a raft of that was punctured, and I was bound to sink.
So I abandoned the raft.
I let myself tread water for years. I was so tired, I didn’t see anything that could save me. So many times I let myself sink — arms drifting loose above my head, fingers gently curled in total relaxation — before survival instinct shot through my neurons and my legs began to kick, my arms no longer adrift but pulling, hands cupped, muscles burning in that mad scramble back to the surface for a bit more life. A bit more struggle.
I began to hate the part of myself that wanted to hope, that still wanted to survive. Why couldn’t I just let go? Why did I still have the desire for something to bring me back to a safe place? What could there be in the world that would make the effort worthwhile?
I hated my hope. It scared me. It made me question everything, when all I really wanted was assurance that it never would get better. Because that would make drowning so much simpler.
I hated God, at first, and then I just stopped caring. If He could be indifferent, so could I.
Luckily, each time I dropped under the surface, I was rescued by a force that didn’t care one bit about my hope or my feelings about divinity. My lungs needed air and my physical needs overpowered my mind for just long enough to get me jolted into a less desperate state.
I was still a mess. But I was a mess who no longer feared or hated the hope for a better life. I saw it once more as a beautiful dream, and I longed to live within it. So I worked. I got better. That makes it sound so succinct and simple, but those deep recovery periods were truly the most difficult of my life to that point. I am thankful for them.
I have seen hope do many things to the people in my life.
One dear friend and teacher filled her heart with it, faced the inevitable course of her own death with a grace that was a gift to witness. Another uses her hope in the face of her daily struggle. She sees it in small things like the cardinals that nest around her home, hears it in the roll of thunder and the smell of rain on hot pavement. She holds hope as a dream, as the reason to make her life beautiful, even when it feels the most difficult.
I have also seen hope kill a loved one, a beautiful soul who was perptually tormented by that elusive place of ‘better,’ who began to see it as unreachable and thus, not worth the struggle to obtain.
I have seen it flower as a will to survive a sentence of certain death, only to turn bitter, cold, and vindictive in those last moments when surrender would have been sweeter than defeat.
And I have found it in my own heart more than once, changing from a dream to a thorny thing I am loath to touch. The circumstances are always different even as they all feel chronically the same. I find my heart swelling with aspirations to watch them transmute to terror. The future once more becomes a door I refuse to open. I am afraid of glimpsing beauty, then being denied entry again, and again, and again.
I want so desperately to find a place of happiness, but repetition is a harsh mistress, and I cannot help but learn. I defend myself against the approach of loss. So I feel myself losing hope, turning away from it, destroying it as a pinprick to a balloon.
I don’t want that buoyancy. I don’t want the temptation of its lightness.
I would rather have two feet stuck in the mud than risk a dream of flight that might send me crashing back to the unforgiving ground.
Monica Deck is an archer, author, and MFA candidate. She lives with bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and really loud tinnitus. She is an advocate for electroconvulsive therapy as a front-line treatment for suicidal depression and has been a mental health care consumer for more than twenty years.
