the death of hope?

A great sadness has come over me, a tidal wave of hopelessness and despair. Sometimes this happens, most often when I am reminded of the countless disappointments and empty dreams that have thus far characterized my life. A recent fantasy reached the point of critical mass and then deflated, and the result is that I am once again forced to look back, rather than ahead, at the portrait of my life in an attempt to understand why this happened and what went wrong. All sorts of answers bounce around in my head but none offer any solace, none are garnered with a lacing of hope. There used to be a day when I pursued my dreams; but I’ve come to find that now I am pursuing not my dreams, not even happiness, but the hope of happiness. My cynicism or stoicism or pessimism or realism or whatever the hell you want to call it demands that I not put my hope in anyone or anything, because every time I’ve embraced any sort of hope, that hope’s proven to be ill-founded. My current state-of-affairs is the result of fruitless hopes and wandering pursuits, all in an attempt to ascertain why things are the way they are along with the attempt to make changes. Changes have been made, to be sure: but the core reason why I made the changes remain unfulfilled. Except for the changes themselves, everything remains unchanged. I made the changes to reach a certain goal; the changes were made, the goal has not been reached. This tends to be a recurring theme, and it lies at the heart (I believe) of my own lack of willpower and resolve to continue making changes; "Why go through all the effort when nothing ever comes out of it?"). Having hoped so much, and been let down every time, I am burdened by the idea of hope.

Some time ago I wrote that hope is like barbed wire: the tighter you hold on, the more it hurts. And from this analogy I drew the conclusion that the best thing to do is to let go. To crucify hope and thereby escape the pain it causes. But what is there without hope? Hope is integral to human living. Because we live in the world we do, and because we are the people we are, a life without hope always—and I mean always leads to suicide. It is hope that sustains us, hope that keeps us going, hope that keeps us alive. Even those who refuse to admit that they hope are showing, by virtue of their resilience and determination in the face of life’s tragedies, that they are fools and self-deceived. Our hopes may not be big and glorious, but hope’s always there—even, in my case, the hope that hope can be found.

In these dark and quiet moments, I grit my teeth and push forward, refusing to give up. Perhaps I hope that things won’t get any worse without entertaining the idea that things will get better. But I want things to get better. I want my life to turn up (for once). I just don’t know what it’ll take. My horoscope said that the time for entertaining fantasies is over and that now’s the time for implementing a practical plan. I don’t buy into horoscopes (they’re on the same level as fortune cookies, in my opinion), but nevertheless it spoke to me: I spend so much time entertaining ridiculous fantasies (ridiculous because they deny what I know to be true, and fantasies because they are just that: fantasies, never to be realized in this sphere of actuality), when I should just be doing what I can to get myself out of this. But at the same time, I’ve done so much without any scent of change in the air. Now it just feels like a waiting game, and I’m growing impatient and hopeless. Logically, I know that things should turn out for the better; I know that life has all its seasons, and that we must all walk them; and I know that while things may seem awful at times, it’s all a matter of perspective. Nonetheless, you can’t just change the lenses through which you perceive the world, and my lenses are stained with all sorts of dark matter which make perceiving the world no different than looking into a mirror. My perception of the world is intimately connected to my perception of myself.

This may sound awful, but it’s the truth: I’ve stopped praying for help. Years and years of praying for help with no answers (or, rather, with counter-answers; everything I’ve prayed for myself has turned out getting worse). The message I receive is that praying for help is walking the bridge into an even worse situation. And when things get better, I fear thanking God for this, because every time I have, it’s not long before it falls apart and I’m left stranded, broken and bleeding, on the rocks. Magnifying the frustration is the fact that whenever I pray for someone—and I mean really pray for something—great and wonderful changes happen in their lives. Contemplating this, I have come to the borderline belief that God doesn’t answer my prayers but is more than eager to answer my prayers for anyone and everyone else. And then I begin to think he has some sort of vendetta against me, and that the current structure of my life (which, to be sure, is a result of failed hopes and futile dreams) is due to God himself. Of course I kill these thoughts; while I’m no deist, I think it’d be better to be that than to entertain the idea of a sadistic god plunging his sadism onto we pitiful human creatures, just to watch us squirm or to punish us. No, I do believe God exists and that God works in our lives. But for the life of me, even with imagination, I can’t see where he’s been at work over the last ten years—except for a handful of incidents, for which I’m thankful—and that affects the manner in which I relate to him.

This is a long post, and it’s over. Basically my point is that I want things to change, but I don’t think they will. My hope isn’t so much in a changed life but in the acquisition of hope for a changed life. I’m not on a quest for happiness but a quest for hope. Both seem equally pointless. Just being raw and honest. Perhaps the best thing I can do is just throw my hands in the air and give up. Accept the lot that life has given me and try to make it through the shit the best I can. That’s the stoic in me speaking. But lying dormant, barely breathing, is a different voice, a different whisper, something uncontainable, something un-killable, something undeniable: the conviction that there’s more, that the story hasn’t yet written its climax, that there’s more going on than meets the eye. I want to believe this, I really do: but at this point I can’t listen to that voice without a hint of mockery.