HOPE REIMAGINED
Hope is in the liminal space between regretting the past and fearing the future. Hope is alive in what is still good.
Have you ever met someone facing adversity yet manages to find joy? They show us what hope looks like. It’s more than wishing really, really hard for a specific outcome. Hope is a place between what could be, if… and what is. It’s a liminal space between longing for the past and fearing the future. It lives in what is still good, even when our wishes don’t come true. It is knowing that our trials, while difficult and sometimes heartbreaking, aren’t the sum of everything. Envisioning our pain in the context of the long arc of time and realizing that it’s seated next to joy gives us hope, even if our wishes don’t come true. Living with reverence for the now allows the future to unfold rather than loom on the horizon and the past to reveal what matters most to us. We have to quiet our rational minds and our need for fairness to let hope in. Our intellect allows us to understand our diseases and comply with our doctors’ plan of care, but hope is the leavening agent deep within us that permeates our beings and allows us to live rather than merely exist. Those outside the chronically ill club might see this as irrational, but for me, it’s the only way to live beyond simply existing.
Comparative suffering, or It could be worse thinking, makes hope slippery and elusive. If we rank order our circumstances and see our feelings as unworthy because we don’t have it as bad as someone else, we don’t allow surrender, weeping, or acknowledgment of loss. The unsettling thing is that human life is fragile. It takes courage to say the quiet part out loud or even whisper it to ourselves, but chronic illness shouts it at us with a bullhorn. Most of us will do anything to deny or ignore our human fragility. It’s disorienting and leaves us wondering how to hope. Often, instead of facing our pain, we build brilliantly engineered skyscrapers of rationalization to distance ourselves from our suffering. Diminishing our pain based on someone else’s, denies the vulnerability we all share and prevents us from accepting ourselves as we are in whatever state we are in.
Thanks for reading Living Well When You're Not! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribed
When we allow ourselves to surrender to our heartbreak and negative emotions, we feel the ache in our whole blessed bodies – the very bodies that are causing the upheaval. Our stomachs burn with acid, our hearts pound, and when we weep, our eyes get swollen and our noses run. When we cry, our bodies help our hearts soften, and we temporarily stop striving for control. This softening of our hearts allows us to reorient our brains away from their protective modes and move from despair to hope. Psychologist Susan David, professor, speaker, and author of Emotional Agility, encourages people to view emotions as data, not directives. Our emotions guide us to understand what we hold dear and can help us find a way to embrace those things despite our circumstances.
Having a tribe of illness warriors helps us know we are not alone. Chronic illness often makes us feel isolated, so we need to find ways to reconnect to the wider world. The kind of circle of support we chose to build is essential. A tribe of illness warriors reminds us we’re not alone. We don’t have to translate our fear of progression, the money stress, the grief for the life we planned, or the exhaustion of explaining it all. People just get it—no platitudes required.
If we’re not careful, support groups can become islands of exile if they are our only source of social interaction. We have to guard against contagious despair and a culture of illness. Expressing our negative emotions is not the same as despair. Despair is the conviction that joy is an illusion. If our interactions and relationships shape us, we must expand our reach beyond the safe place of our support groups. We need people in our lives who let us know that hope still exists, even when we don’t have it at that moment, and we can do the same for them. None of us escapes the pain of life. If we don’t have meaningful interactions and interests outside of the group, we risk losing perspective and becoming refugees in search of a home.
How do you keep hope alive?
