It feels good to be hopeful
even when you don't have a very good reason.
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A little wondering about hopefulness.
I’m back! No payout to my brother!
For a lot of reasons, this week has had me thinking about “hope.”
Though I tend to think of myself as hopeful, I sometimes question if I can really say that when I rely so much on pharmaceuticals to make it possible. Without those pills, I can tend toward a kind of listlessness (we call it depression), that can feel… hopeless. But it’s not hopeless, not really. It’s a lack of optimism and a lack of energy, but I think my basic stance is still colored hopeful.
So, yes, I think I can still say I’m hopeful, though I will admit that being hopeful with the support of psychiatry has a certain taste to it. It’s different than I imagine being hopeful would feel if we weren’t always at war, weren’t always seeing health insurance access shrinking, and we had more inspiring societal leadership. Given the circumstances, I’ll take what I can get.
What are the reasons, then, for my hopefulness? What are the reasons that aren’t grown in a lab and sold in a pharmacy?1
Some of it is surely delusion. I have been journaling about this lately, the relationship between delusion and power, and while I don’t have clarity on it yet, there’s a strong connection. What I’ll say for now is that there might be something about the experience of growing up gay in the 2000s when the best people could offer you was the phrase: “It gets better.” Not: “Let’s make it better now,” but “It will get better, eventually, somehow, maybe, when you change everything about your life.” Something about that connects delusion with the hopefulness, for me.
It wasn’t much of a reassurance, that it would “get better,” but I can appreciate the honesty of it. Considering the main motivation for that specific campaign was to get gay kids to stop killing themselves, they couldn’t risk overpromising. There weren’t illusions of making everyone accept gay kids right away, it was just a plea to those gay kids specifically to keep sticking around long enough for life to change, to get even a little better. Not “It gets perfect.” but “It gets better.”
There’s more to say about this that I don’t have time to say today, but I’ll come back to it. Do you remember the “It Gets Better” campaign? Did it leave any mark on you that you notice?
Some thing(s) I’m feeling more certain about lately:
There’s something for me in the Quaker church. I have a big attachment to the Catholic Church and would say that it feels a part of me in much the same way that being from Texas does — I couldn’t exorcise the Catholic faith from my body any more than I can stop saying “y’all.” But I can’t deny the resonance I feel with the Quaker theology that I’ve read or the rightness that is present in a Quaker meeting house.
Reality TV is something altogether different than narrative storytelling, but it also is not anything like real life. Duh, yes, but also woof, is it… bad? Good? Evocative? I love TV.
Some thing(s) I’m feeling less certain about lately:
Has self-advocacy at work jumped the shark?? I am kidding… kind of… I am so tired of the HR-ification of workplaces. I think this is a different strain of the disease called the therapization of life (also bad and annoying), but I have come across this specific version of it a few times lately. It’s when there’s a demand, especially at work or in public spaces, that systems/processes should prevent any need for honest disagreement and I’m tired of it. It’s not self-advocacy if it’s passive aggressive! I’m being cagey for probably obvious reasons lol.
Something I want to do less of:
Ordering out. It’s the classic and constant embarrassment for me ever since delivery apps appeared on my iPhone and it’s only gotten worse as I’ve realized how easy it is to put in a pickup order at any of the several wonderful restaurants around my house. I do not have the money or the activity level to justify this amount of ordering food that is frequently fried. My body needs a salad.
Something I want to do more of:
I’m sticking with last week’s answer, which is to do more Peloton rides, because I still haven’t gotten on in a week. What I have been doing is walking on my walking pad and getting back into a lifting routine which has gotten me excited for biking, so I expect to have a different goal for this spot next week. Watch this space…
Thank you for reading, from Oliver and me!
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
I should say that of course I see the relevance of my white-cis-male-middle-class-advanced-degree-holding-gainfully-employed-ness to this question. Who wouldn’t be hopeful being dealt such a hand? Yes, lots of people, but the truth is that these social markers make it easier to keep looking for the next horizon, to stay looking at the bright side. So that’s that.