How I Learned to Practice Hope
It is a skill to practice, not a pre-destined quality.
One of the worst feelings in the world I think I’ve ever felt is hopelessness. Hopelessness is the bedrock of depression. The truest of pits of despair is the one where you understand neither how you got there, nor the depth of the pit, nor location of the pit — and forget about how the F to get out of the pit. You’re powerless to the whim of your emotions and your emotions are powerless to the whim of the dark infernal forces of depression, grief, inadequacy , impostor syndrome— you name it. Buried alive by the suffocating nature of your own self-sabotage.
So, how does one fill the void left deep in our chests when we feel we’ve abandoned all hope? What exactly do we do when we have no idea what to do?
It was in the midst of attempting to doom scroll my way into oblivion during one of my lowest of depressive moods that I came across a soundbite I was ready to dismiss as tabloid fodder, but would later become the catalyst of my own personal critical analysis of the power of the psyche and manifestation. It was music, fashion, and makeup mogul Miss Robyn Rihanna Fenty. She was responding to an inquiry about what she does when she’s not feeling her best or most confident. “Pretend,” she said. “I mean, it’s either that or cry myself to sleep. Who wants to do that? You wake up with puffy eyes the next day, it’s a waste of tears.”
Was this a groundbreaking statement? No. Was it the first time someone has advocated for the ‘fake it ’til you make it’ technique? No. Do I think tears are something that can be wasted? Absolutely not (let those bad boys flow!). Was the timing of my coming across this sentiment universally aligned and fated? Yeah, I think so.
Something about my engaging with that statement at that very moment in my life felt pre-destined. So I decided to try Miss Fenty’s technique and here’s what I found:
Oddly enough, this sentiment spoke to the ex-student athlete in me who — back in the good old days — after suffering a gnarly ankle sprain on the soccer field, would convince herself that if she just told herself she was okay and got back into the GD game, she would eventually feel okay. (Oh, how I wish emotional pain was as simple as physical pain!). It wasn’t until I happened upon a similar protocol for mental fortitude that I was able to liken the two — my depression and anxiety being the metaphorical ankle and life being the metaphorical game. Pain and suffering or not, I was dead set on getting back in the game. I decided to do that with life — putting myself in the scenarios that I would have otherwise avoided due to my mental state and telling myself I’m okay so that I’d eventually feel okay.
It was not long into this journey — which, may I add, was not an easy nor comfortable one, but one where I did feel myself making steady progress — that I started to wonder: I’m getting stronger, I’m doing better, but what part of me am I strengthening exactly? If improving the health of a sprained ankle was about strengthening the muscles surrounding the ankle joint, I wanted to know what muscles I was strengthening as I nursed my sprained emotions.
Mental health researcher and storyteller Brené Brown defines hope as “not an emotion,” but, “a way of thinking or a cognitive process.” She even goes on to depict hope as something of skill that one can hone with practice. Without knowing it at the time that I decided to get back into the proverbial game, I had begun strengthening the muscles that allowed me to exercise hope.
It was around this time that I sat in on a brief lecture on self-compassion, the detailed contents of which I won’t bore you with, but which I do want to highlight a simple, yet tragic truth: We were never explicitly taught self-compassion. Think about it for a sec… Maybe we had a constant influx of love and reassurance flowing from every direction, maybe we didn’t. Maybe we had parents, caregivers, and teachers that reassured us and told them they were proud of us, maybe we didn’t. That’s one of those ‘life is like a box of chocolates’ things — you never know what you’re gonna get (or be deprived of) when it comes to external displays of compassion. Regardless, though, when I — someone who considers herself extremely lucky to have been dealt the ‘extremely kind, loving, and understanding support system’ hand in life — really tried to remember a time I was taught about self-compassion as a tool, a strategy, a skill to be developed, and I came up with nothing! I couldn’t deny the privilege of being surrounded by compassion my whole life (for which I’m grateful to this day), but why did I struggle so much to have it for myself?
I realized in that moment that compassion, like acceptance, is something that we’ve grown used to finding in external sources — friends, family, co-workers, lovers, etc. — and that is the very reason why it, like hope, can feel so elusive. It’s hard to quite put into words the sense of personal power I felt when making this small discovery for myself. In a world where so many systems around us — including the very systems meant to analyze, counsel, support, and, at times, medicate our mental health — are either directly or indirectly concerned with removing power from the individual and maintaining power in those systems, I felt that — in my own small, special way — I had cracked open some sort of matrix. (Or maybe my escapist dissociations just wanted me to cosplay as Neo in my mind that day — either way, progress was made).
So how does one get started practicing hope? Well, that’s, on one hand, subjective, and, on another hand, a topic for another blog post. But I will provide a brief and, again, so simple you may think I’m joking, example that, with practice and repetition, contributed greatly to making life a little less unbearable during an already tough time:
During this dark journey of my soul, traversing the uncertainty and horror of the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic while balancing the weight of my two heaviest demons, depression and anxiety, on my shoulders, my bed was a place of great comfort and solace as well as a place of great despair. Comfort and solace because I knew, no matter the events of the day, at some point I would find myself back in the safety of my covers, blissfully (and let’s be real, neglectfully,) escaping to the whimsical Land of Oo and embarking on magical quests with its greatest adventurers, Finn and Jake (this is all a metaphor for me, bundled up in bed, head craned over my phone’s ridiculously small screen, watching episodes of “Adventure Time” until I dozed off — in case you weren’t picking up on that). This was a good feeling, a safe one — but not in a sustainable way. For, the greatest beast was always lurking just around the corner, and that beast was the next day.
At this time in my life, the very thought of enduring another day having to balance these immensely heavy emotional burdens felt unbearable. As dark as it sounds, I dreaded the very thought of waking up. So I went to sleep each night either in a cannabis and food-induced stupor or trying my best to brace myself for the pain of the following day.
And it was in this very practice of preparation that I injected some of that ‘fake it ’til you make it’ style hope. I decided, instead of bracing myself for pain, to (and trust me, this is much easier said than done) tell myself to get excited about the possibilities of a new day. Simple? Yes. Groundbreaking? No. Easy to say? Sure. Easy to believe. Hell no! This is where we need to trust the process. Yeah — that process your therapist has been trying to get you to consider for the last 2 months? That one. The process that promises a glimmer of light at the end of a long tunnel of hard work but, with the so suffocatingly tight and oddly cozy wrap of darkness draped around us, it feels almost impossible to trust.
But trust we must. It wasn’t any bright stroke of genius or spiritual epiphany for me to decide to trust the process; instead, it was just the product of me feeling like I had no other choice. I was out of options and it was time to attempt ‘Operation: Be Kind to Yourself and Just Try’. This is where practice and repetition come into play — two more concepts very familiar to the student athlete in me.
I used to shrug off the power of mantras, affirmations, and other powerful words or phrases one may repeat to themselves when they’re in need of calm, confidence, or the like. I couldn’t grasp the fact that simply saying words to yourself could help alter your mood. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to believe the kind words I was telling myself. This changed for me when I made the conscious decision to start practicing hope. Telling myself to be excited for the possibilities of a new day did not automatically switch my mindset, nor did my days automatically start getting better. Something in me, however, told me to hold on and be resilient — to just keep trying a little longer. After a little while, I noticed something important: 1. I was feeling a bit better day by day, and 2. It wasn’t the days themselves that were changing, it was my sense of motivation to seek out opportunities to have a better day. By repeating this practice of telling myself that tomorrow has the possibility of being a good day, I was priming my mind to make it happen. It felt like some sort of magic.
From here, I decided to try affirmations (I’d like to call them daily affirmations, but consistent routines are not my strong suit). I began telling myself that I am confident, I am beautiful, I am creative, and all that gushy self-compassion stuff. I started to fondly call them my “Bad Bitch Affirmations”. And, similar to the practice of hoping for a better day, I started to realize that, the more I practiced these affirmations, the more I sought out opportunities to prove to myself that I am, indeed, all of those amazing things.
These simple practices have helped me, on many occasions, convert downward spirals toward the black abyss of despair into energizing cycles of acceptance, compassion, and resilience (and bad bitchery! Thanks, affirmations!). Don’t get me wrong, I still have my moments, days, weeks where it is really hard to practice hope. What I’ve found is the best thing to do in those hard times is: just find it in yourself to have a little hope anyway. Even if it’s hard to believe, even if you’re exhausted, even if you’re inner critic is hurling insult after demoralizing insult at you; say one positive affirmation, take at least one deep breath and tell yourself you accept yourself, allow yourself a glimmer of hope that at least one part of tomorrow may be a little brighter. You deserve it.
