Hope and Despair

“We learn nothing from despair. That's what makes it despair.” ~ Marty Rubin

The despair I have felt since the 2016 election has become a force of nature. I fall asleep to it, wake up with it, and feel it every moment in between. Sometimes it invaded my sleep and gives me nightmares. It's a black cloud of burden and there's no escape, no safe place to run to, no shelter. I turn off the news and try to distract myself. I remind myself that even the most poisonous of politicians don't last forever. We are, I tell myself, like the Six Million Dollar Man, better, stronger and we can be rebuilt. Mostly. I hope.

I recently heard an interview by Michael Scott Moore, the author of “The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast”. Hope, he writes, is like heroin to a hostage and it can be just as destructive.” The words resonated with me. Later in the interview he said, Despair and hope are just two ways of approaching the future and it turns out, you can live without hope.

So maybe one of my favorite authors is wrong. Maybe despair does teach us something if no more than how vital it is to take a break from it. I can't make it disappear entirely but I can, sometimes, exile it into a temporary, semi-retreat. I can, sometimes, force it to the edges of my mind and diminish its power for small sections of time.

I don't know whether it will be enough but it's all I've got right now.