Wise Words- Hope, Hopelessness, and Despair

I wrote this in March of 2022 and it sat in drafts. I don't know why I never posted it, but it is too good to not share----------

I recently finished listening to yet another one of Brené Brown's books. This most recent one is titled Atlas of the Heart- Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Each time I read her books that reflect her research I find that I am surprised by how much of her conclusions align so closely with the philosophies I have come to live by from my own personal experiences moving through the last almost 41years on this earth.

This current book discusses the many human emotions and explained why those with a limited vocabulary for the spectrum not only are hindered in their ability to express and deal with what they are feeling, but that paucity may also limit their ability to fully feel the full range of emotions. When I came across her section on hope, I found that it summarized perfectly how I view hope and why I believe that it is possible to feel and be hopeless. It also explains why I feel a tangible difference now.

Hope. We need hope like we need air. To live without hope is to risk suffocating on hopelessness and despair....

Hope is a way of thinking. It's a cognitive process....

We experience hope when we have the ability to set realistic goals, we are able to figure out how to achieve those goals [pathway]. Agency- we believe in ourselves. I can set a goal I know where I want to go. I know how to get there. I believe I can do this. Hope is a function of struggle. We develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort. Hope is forged when our goals, pathways and agency are tested and when change is actually possible.

We don’t build hope when the systems or the things that need to be changed actually can't be moved by us and unfortunately there are times when hope is just not sufficient to combat entrenched systemic barriers. It doesn’t matter how much hope we have if the deck is stacked or the rules apply to some but not others. That’s actually a recipe for hopelessness and despair. We think we should be able to overcome an obstacle, however, the system is rigged so there is no possible positive outcome...

Hope is learned.

Hopelessness and despair are both emotions. Hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns... and the perceived inability to change our circumstances.

Not being able to set realistic goals and we can't figure out how to achieve them.... We don't believe in ourselves or our ability to achieve what we want.

Hopelessness can apply to a specific situation.

Despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person's entire life and future

When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, that's when we feel despair.

Despair- the belief that tomorrow will be just like today. Theologian Rob Bell

A couple months ago I shared with a group of female physicians that I finally feel hope and peace since moving out of the US. During my advocacy work I remember so many times feeling this sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Each time I would see no possible pathway to significant change, I became frustrated and angry. Many times I was encouraged by those who had been doing the work much longer than me to have hope. They saw the way to achieve our goals of equity even while acknowledging the many hindrances we were facing. I do believe that hope is learned. I believe that they learned it through their struggles and that each time small progress is made it helps them to be even more hopeful. My closest friends would share stories with me of the individual lives that they saw improvement in- the child who was no longer suicidal, the Black family finally able to be heard by the school principal about the racial trauma their child has been experiencing in school.

Was I living in despair? I was not depressed but I was not happy either. I had means but I did not feel free. I felt claustrophobic like if sinking deeper into quicksand with the grains of sand being all of those millions of people who denied my humanity and upheld white supremacy and capitalism.

Working on leaving the US presented a pathway out for me. A pathway toward a place where I could be me first before my skin color. A pathway toward a place in which I didn't have to defend the basic human right of body autonomy and I didn't have to be the servant to the insurance companies. A pathway toward a land of beauty and the ability to be more than just a doctor or a person begging for that which no one wants to give.

This section in Brene's book reminded me of how easy it is to slip into despair. While it can be caused when you assume a global issue of a specific problem, it is also easy to see that if you have an accumulation of specific hopeless situations, it is easy to and even appropriate to slip into the global sense of despair. If we see no way of changing our situation we no longer have all of the ingredients necessary for hope to live. It is that simple.

I often said that when we tell our Black and brown kids in America that all they need for success is to work hard, we are lying to them to their faces. There is no meritocracy in such a racist and capitalistic country. We lie to our children then are surprised when they realized that it was all bullshit like when kids learn that Santa doesn't exist. When aspects of themselves they cannot change prove to be the biggest determinant of their success and hard work and capacity unnecessary if you are white but not enough if you are Black, they quickly come to the conclusion that there is no point in trying.

Children learn hope by having struggles amidst the agency to work through them and the pathways to circumvent barriers. They have a goal and know from experience that there is hope in their acheiving it. I left because I want my kids to have that agency. I want my kids to have ALL of the ingredients for hope.

I am so grateful for my activist friends for showing me that there is pathway and agency when often times I found it hard to see it and that the smallest of victories are enough to keep hope alive.