Hope

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How?

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Essays Personal

How do we keep going? How do we put one foot in front of the other, over and over, moving toward an unnamed goal that somehow has a million hopeful and beautiful inner images to illustrate it on our internal vision board even though we can never fully pin it down?

How can we keep that focus when the world is burning all around us? We seem doomed to keep repeating the patterns of the past, the hatred and need to subjugate those deemed lesser, more expendable, worth only what can be extracted from those with more money and power and the right background and gender and skin tone.

How can I keep hope alive when I see the atrocities that humans perpetuate daily? So many of us look away, glad that it’s not us or those we love, turning back to our mundane daily issues that keep us from contemplating how close to ruin we are every day, both personal and planetary.

And how can I keep doing all the small things that mean a lot to me but nothing in the greater scheme without feeling like I’m betraying the world, ignoring what’s actually happening? How do I stand up and say “I have books for you; please buy them” when I know so many people begging for mutual aid just to keep their housing or pay medical bills or eat?

There’s no easy answer to these questions.

I ask myself these things every week, sometimes multiple times a week. I struggle over them. I am one small dot in this world, with no power or money and a failing body. What can I do?

I get loud. I advocate for people and things I want to support. I try to put my money where it’s most needed, not that I have enough to make a difference by any means. I’m struggling too. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

I write stories where the answers come a little easier.

Not too easy. Never so easy that there’s not ethical dilemmas that must be wrestled with, and prices to be paid. But stories that are written to give us some hope, some magic to believe in, and characters with strength and morals and will that hopefully can inspire readers to do the same, even if it’s in small ways.

Is that enough? I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe I’m even a terrible person for offering hope at all. I don’t believe that–not usually–but today’s been a challenging day and I’m not sure I’m the good guy I want to be when I write stories like this.

But no, fuck that.

I am not one to give up. Even when my brain chemicals were telling me to do so every day, I fought back because I do believe that we can be better and do better, as my character Vali boldly asserts. All my characters take parts of my heart and my head and put them on the page to keep me going as well as you, because we all need that kind of hope.

We can’t give up. This is the only planet, the only people, the only existence we know for sure we’ll get.

Optimism is a Choice

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Essays Personal

My optimism comes from a strange and twisted place, I suspect. I took “it could always be worse” and lived through it multiple times, defiantly wielding the phrase against yet another disaster in my life, over and over. 

No matter how “worse” things got, I hung on, looking to the knowledge that things have been better to get me through those times. And there was always farther I could fall, so for now, this was tolerable. 

“It could always be worse” inherently implies “Things have been better and could be again.” 

Usually, the worst I could imagine was being dead. Once you’re dead, there’s no chance of redemption or escape from the bad place you’re stuck in. I even said that when I was in the hospital after I did indeed almost die: “How am I? Could be worse! I could not be here!” Doctors and nurses, family and friends all heard me say that in a cheerful voice, because I knew how lucky I’d been. I was thrilled to still be here, even though I was in pain with a giant incision. I was alive, I could recover, and now we had answers to why I’d felt so bad for large swathes of my life. You bet I was cheerful. 

After that, being dead was firmly established as rock bottom. 

It allowed me to deal with further surgeries, even though I was scared. I had a second intestinal resection and fascial dehiscence repair, both of which were a lot harder than my first surgery in some ways. I wasn’t as strong or as healthy [outside of Crohn’s Disease] for those surgeries as I was for the first surprise surgery for bowel perforation. And I’d gone through a very long recovery from that first surgery–almost a year!–and multiple bacterial infections.

But when I woke up after, in the recovery room, I was grateful and optimistic. I was still here. I got to live. 

You have to understand, I have been through a lot of bad things in my life. I’ve been unhoused, and homeless. [they are not the same thing] I’ve been in several abusive relationships. I’ve gone through some of the most traumatic things a person can go through, and still, still I refuse to let that dim my optimism.

I’m still here. Things could be worse. 

Now I have accomplished so many of the dreams that I had when I was young, including careers  and experiences that people often think are impossible to easily achieve. I managed that with another handy philosophical phrase: “What’s the worst that can happen?” 

No one’s died from being told “no, you can’t be a DJ” or “your book sucks.” Luckily I haven’t had those experiences [yet] but I can confidently guarantee that I won’t die if they do. A busted gut didn’t kill me, rejection sure as hell won’t!

A cheating husband didn’t kill me. It shook my faith in myself for a while, but it didn’t take me out. I avoided being taken out by drinking and drugs, thank goodness. [and I’ve been sober for 20 years now!] Depression hasn’t killed me, though it tried really hard a couple of times. Losing jobs, homes, friends, whole eras of my life? They didn’t take me out, either. They all hurt like hell, but I made it through, and had happy times again. 

The rise of fascism in the country where I live? That might take me out, eventually. I’m not the first target in their crosshairs, but I’m on the list. I’ve been loud about my opposition, and loud about my support for those who are currently targeted. But I’m still here, still fighting for others who are in the crosshairs before me, and I will do that until they manage to kill me. 

I’m still here. I’m still loud about that. I’m loud about others not being as lucky–and that’s what it is, if I’m honest, luck–and I will continue to draw attention to the things our government would rather we were silent and accepting about. That’s not going to happen. They’ll have to kill me to get me to shut up. 

And even still, my optimism that we can have a better world keeps me going. At this point, it’s not for me. It’s for the people who will be here when I’m gone, especially those who have had less privilege and luck than me. I want it for the children of the people who barely had chances to get ahead, who had to fight against racial prejudice and the systemic reinforcements that stem from that prejudice in every corner of their lives. I doubt I’ll see it change in my lifetime; in theory I probably only have another twenty years or so. That’s a sobering thought, but also one that lights a fire under me to do my best to reinforce the optimism I carry with concrete action. 

If you have more projected time than I do, you have more time to work toward that goal. What are you doing with that time?

So yes, I’m an optimist. It’s my fuel for going forward, for doing my best to push for positive change in these times for future generations, ones I’ll never see. That’s the difference between someone like me and those in power right now, who only look to fill their pockets and their soul with pleasures of the moment, no matter the cost to others. 

We have to use that optimism to envision a better world and also to work for it. Otherwise we’re just pacifying ourselves. Otherwise, you might as well just sink down into despair, because what’s the difference at that point?

Which will you choose?