With Hope
Mondays are tricky. I wake up with the enthusiasm of an Olympian gold medalist, ready to take on the world. A fresh start to the work week! A new beginning! A chance to be bold! Be better! Wear a new outfit! Achieve things! Once the coffee wears off, though, I usually settle into a more realistic mood—you know, somewhere between treading water and basic survival.
That’s an exaggeration, actually. Rock bottom was not my look today. (Although if you’d seen me four/nine/twelve months ago, you would have seen a woman in deep despair.)
Do you know what despair means?
despair (n), the complete loss or absence of hope
(…hope...the one thing I absolutely cannot lose.)
But we’re not here to talk about despair. Let’s get on with it, then. Mind, body, spirit—Day 3, let’s go:
Mind - I hopped into a Zoom therapy session during the lunch hour. My homework since our last session was to write out an “angry list”. Yes, I was assigned to document everything that made me mad. For two weeks.
I brought several pages to the session—things like, I’m angry that Covid caused my industry to crumble, I’m angry that I can’t read to D at bedtime, I’m angry that my favorite dress doesn’t fit, I’m angry that this kitten insists on urinating in the pot that holds my fiddle leaf fig, and so on…
There were much darker confessions on the list—fury over court outcomes, helpless outrage fueled by years of what I thought to be harmless ultimatums and threats…I wrote it all down.
My therapist, whom I’ve been with for four years and in fact, I met when I called to ask if she would take on a wife and husband on the brink of divorce (could she help us, I pleaded… hope).
The lesson tied up in this assigned list exercise came down to a simple truth: anger, really, is one of two emotions—sadness or fear. And, yes, when I read through the pages of anger and anguish, I saw that everything I’d penned was initiated through sadness and/or fear.
As you can imagine, that gave my mind plenty to sort through today. If I can label the sadness and the fear, perhaps I can sift through the anger and begin making room for that thing that gets me up in the morning—that beautiful, boundless, brave hope.
Body - After work, I put on my sneakers and turned on the playlists and went for a walk at Railroad Park, one of Birmingham’s most stunning public spaces.
Confession: October sunsets are one of my favorite parts of living. And tonight’s sunset, a pink and purple dappled display, restored a small part of the hope bucket, filled it up a tad. Hey—it’s something.
Spirit - Tonight’s perfect October sunset reminded me of a mural I painted on the living room wall in my college apartment. (I painted many other things on the walls throughout that tiny apartment, none of which my landlord thought were charming. I’ve never seen a man so annoyed with self-expressed beauty. Can you believe he demanded I cover it all with white paint? When I moved out, I painted over everything EXCEPT that October sunset. Why? Because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and I beheld that tiny mural to be a mf masterpiece.)
This reflection (of my hope-filled college days and all the many days that followed) led me to something—a question…
What if hope is stronger than anger?
Hope. It runs through my veins. It’s what launches me out of bed every morning (especially on Mondays). It’s my ethos, my spirit guide, my excuse for trying, yet again, to make it work. It’s the lens through which I see the world. On most days it’s a gift. On others, admittedly, a handicap.
What if? What if HOPE is the ultimate warrior? I’d like to find out.
x,
lk
