The One Place You Can Find Hope Right Now

Photo by Mesut Kaya on Unsplash

Some days, I feel like launching a career as a de-motivational speaker.

An email from a longtime reader arrived yesterday morning.

“We need you to give us hope right now.” the writer instructed.

“So many of us are scared and worried, and we need your voice in these moments, now more than ever. With all that our nation is facing in the coming year, your voice is so important.”

I truly appreciated her earnest belief in me but promised her that what she’s looking for is well above my qualifications and beyond my pay grade.

I also assured her that the voice I’m presently using is my voice, and that whether that feels like encouragement or not to her lately, isn’t really up to me nor is it something I’m all that concerned with.

I reminded her that authenticity is the only commitment I ever make in the work I do: that I respond honestly in real-time to the world around me, and for those who find affinity in the words, I’m grateful they can be a small source of support and encouragement to make difficult days a bit easier—but hope-giving? I’m pretty sure that’s not part of the deal.

Now, it may sound like an exercise in semantics, but hope isn’t something anyone can give you; it doesn’t come from a post you read or a speech you stream or a seminar you attend. It’s not downloaded from social media or handed down like an inheritance from a wise, older relative. It isn’t a generous gift you receive from a stranger or even absorbed from someone close to you. Truthfully, there is literally nothing outside of you that can alter you internally.

Ultimately, hope is an inside job.
It can’t arrive or be given, it must be chosen.
It is a decision we come to, sometimes because of and sometimes completely despite the objective data or experiential evidence around us.

That isn’t to say that we all shouldn’t make valiant efforts to remind people that they’re not alone in the nightmares that plague them, that we shouldn’t provide evidence of the places we have agency in the midst of the worst-case scenario, that we shouldn’t make every effort to give the frazzled and fucked-up human beings we cross paths with, every possible reason not to fully collapse under the weight of the existential shit storm we’re walking into. We absolutely must.

I do my best to do all of these things, as much as I feel they are congruent with my heart at any given moment, but I also unapologetically wear the despair and frustration and disappointment on my sleeve so that others can find themselves in that frank fragility. I think there is tremendous value in specifically naming every grief, in identifying each systemic failure, in inventorying all the crises we’re faced with, in defining the gravity of the moment. The last thing we should be doing right now is shielding one another from objective reality for fear that it will be too much to bear.

I know that personally, I have a myriad of reasons that propel me into days I’d prefer not to walk into and into years I’m fully dreading, like the one we’ve just begun:
my desire to leave a more compassionate planet for my children,
my fierce love for vulnerable people,
my shaken but still present belief in the basic decency of most human beings,
the knowledge that all evil empires fall,
the defiant joy that refuses to allow a small group of sociopaths I’ll never meet to define my existence or control my happiness.

But none of those things are transferable. They comprise the specific armor around my heart that I passionately hammer out all over again every morning, to greater or lesser success. And though I find strength and feel less alone and am spurred on by creators and artists and activists and ordinary people—that won’t ever be enough to send me into the fray of a year like the one that’s approaching. That is going to be between me and the guy staring back at me in the morning when I brush my teeth.

I sincerely want to be a help to every person who takes the time to read what I write or listen to what I have to say, but I also know the limits of such things.

Friend, if you want hope, just like me and everyone else walking this planet on a day none of us have ever been to, you’re gonna need to reach into the deepest reservoirs of what you know and believe and value, and decide a thousand times a day if that’s a compelling enough reason to brave the bruises and the battles waiting for you.

After all is said and done and written and read, we each need to look for hope, not online or from people we know or strangers we respect from a distance—but in the mirror.

That’s the only place we’ll ever discover it.

Why are you choosing to be hopeful right now? Let me know in the comments.