Backbones, Meds, & Continuance: Hope in 2022
Another year, another theme come and gone. As I wrote about in April, my theme this year was Hope. So here at the end of 2022 are three more things I’ve learned about hope:
Hope has a stronger backbone than I thought.
When I started this year, I thought of hope as a lightweight, something fanciful, built on a cloud of optimism and just as sturdy. I chose it as a theme because I needed light, any light I could find. But I’ve come to see hope as more robust, as something that allows you to move forward rather than sink into despair or apathy. Hope can give you legs to stand on, a tenacity to continue even when you don’t know the outcome. I love this description of hope that I found (via LDS Christian scholar Melissa Inouye) in a speech by Chieko Okazaki, a former leader in my church: “I think of hope as a modest but very tough everyday virtue, an ordinary but resilient virtue that is both gentle and beautiful. It is an unassuming but powerful force for good that will greatly increase our ability to do good and to be good.” Why is hope tough and robust? As Sister Okazaki puts it, “the sources of hope are the sources of life itself. That’s why hope persists, even when experience, reason, and knowledge all say there is no reason to hope. Hope does not calculate odds.” We have hope because we are alive, and, for me, because I am alive in Christ.
Meds are really helpful for feeling hope.
Another thing that allowed me to feel hopeful was starting an SSRI medication to help me fight depression. Like a lot of people, even though I supported medication use for other people, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it for myself. I’d learned just enough about how much we don’t know about SSRIs as a neuroscience undergrad to feel justified in being wary, even though I had also learned that they helped people feel better. But last winter found me stuck in a dark place, the bottom of my soul cracking open into an abyss below. So with gentle recommendations from friends and my therapist, I decided to start taking medication. For me, meds have helped to seal over that abyss, so that even when I feel dark, I also feel like I can reach out and get help, that the world is not hopeless.
The world has survived a lot more than the last six months, and it will continue.
My dad calls himself a “rational optimist” and is always telling me that, statistically, the world is getting better. Usually this only serves to frustrate me, because I’ve probably been ranting to him about some fear or other I have about how the world is getting worse (climate change, AI, anti-democratic movements, etc.). But whether or not the world is getting better (and there is some data suggesting that it is), it has become easier to believe that the world will probably continue and the worst is not necessarily the most likely outcome (thanks meds!). As writer Katherine Miller recently put it, “Even within all this pain and dark possibility, some news has defied expectations. Russia hasn’t rolled through Ukraine…. Many of the biggest names in American election conspiracies — and especially the people who wanted to control the levers of election bureaucracy — lost their races in the states that matter most to the transfer of presidential power….There was not widespread violence or unrest on Election Day or in response to results.” My worst fears are not always right. On Election Day, I was talking to a professor about how stressed I felt and complained that I wasn’t sure I could continue to care so much after what felt like life or death elections over the last 6 years. She wisely reminded me that for Black people like her, America has been a life or death situation for a lot longer than the last 6 years. That was a humbling experience and reminded me to open my perspective on what counts as getting better or worse, more or less stressful, and for whom. As Annie Dillard wrote over 20 years ago,
“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?”
In these ordinary, extraordinary times, with chaos and continuance, I add my voice with what hope I have to Sister Okazaki’s, “Choose life even though the forces of death seem strong! Choose hope even though despair seems close! Choose to grow even though circumstances oppress you! Choose to learn even though you must struggle against your own ignorance and that of others! Choose to love, even though ours are days of violence and vengeance.”
Happy New Year!
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