HOPE...

Started by woodsgnome, May 28, 2015, 08:55:59 PM

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woodsgnome

HOPE, ANYWAY? HOW DO YOU DO IT, WHERE TO FIND IT, HOW TO KEEP IT?

CPTSD is such a roller-coaster. The 1 step ahead, 2 back cliche kicks in here. But sometimes it feels more like 1 forward, 10 or 100 back. And then you start over again. Maybe. So from where do we derive hope? This has been a daily challenge for me for years. But I often wonder why...why so hard; why so repetitive; so enticing; so endlessly disappointing?

For a while I felt the answer was self-acceptance, and that certainly helps—it's still a work in progress, and I still have trouble with it. I don't know. The danger of self-acceptance is it can become stupid resignation, like ho-hum this happened, poor me, now I go on—just like all the well-meaning folks who prattle their "you'll get over it" wisdom. And of course in reality all life is lived now, in this moment only, and what's past or future is really irrelevant. Fine. But I still hurt, and it stems from the past and it lives via flashbacks that rein me in, and I flee into safe retreat mode yet again.

So where is my hope or do I just cycle round to accepting again? And doesn't self-acceptance seem like just another compromise, sellout, false promise, foolish notion? Always more questions than answers, and they drive me stir-crazy. Hope? Yeah, right.

My best recent inspiration to find and accept hope stems from a story about a teenager from a couple years back. He was dying, slowly, of a rare bone cancer, and was fully aware of that every excruciating day. He wanted somehow to help others once his own fate was sealed, but he had no idea or plan as to how to make that happen. His mother suggested he write some goodbye letters to friends—he tried, it just didn't feel right for him. But he did love his guitar, and he had gotten confident enough with it to start playing around with songwriting. He liked that notion better than mere letters—write and record some songs for people he knew, and by which they'd remember him. So he started scribbling some lyrics and set them to music.

A series of events led to his recording some tunes, and one in particular ("Clouds" by Zach Sobiech) touched millions more than the few friends he thought would ever hear it.  It was about falling, into a hole where there is no hope, but ends with a forward vision and...a hope. Not for cures, or for ease, or any specific--just hope, despite his line "I'll never get my chance". The upbeat tune matched the hope, but the message was both dark/bright and there's a perceptible drag towards despair right in the middle of the song, where the hope seems about to fade, but doesn't. It did eventually make its way to I-Tunes (all the proceeds to cancer research), YouTube, 2 documentaries, tons of news stories, and was a worldwide sensation of sorts, this tale of a boy and how he lived his wish to help others see the beauty in life in spite of it all and just this vague...hope. And within a couple of months, he was gone.

Some of you may be familiar with this story, but what always struck me was how/why/where did he get this hope from? And, really, hope for what...? One thing I did note from reading about him was that he had a strong, loving family. Well, okay, I didn't (that hope burned), but the story still resonated--how there was hope in spite of no-hope. It didn't make the most sense, which is part of its appeal, I suppose.

His sister wrote a blog about how his death affected her and she notes:

"People often say you need to "have hope"- like it's this thing you can capture, cage, and keep with you.

"But you don't just "have" hope when your life is threatened with zealous bone cells or slogged through chemo machines. You don't just "have" hope when you watch helplessly as your brother dies, when you try to pack all the future, past, and present love you feel into a weak whisper an inch away from a cooling ear. Because every needle p****, every inflamed rash, every pulsing and tender tumor forces the decision to hope to be made over and over. Hope takes practice and intention.

"Zach had to decide that threat of death would not take him alive, that the best case scenario could be real. Even at the end, when there was no best case scenario, he made one. He hoped anyway. I saw him fight for it."

(Her full blog entry is at https://sailingwiththeknight.wordpress.com/ and is the entry for August 27, 2014, near the top, titled "To Hope, Anyway").

She actually surmised that he made hope look easy, and found out in her own grief that it wasn't, that he had just decided on the hope, anyway, and lived it in his own best way.

Combined with some other things in my life, I found the story inspiring and it gave me a new affirmation—to hope, anyway. No, his hope wasn't directly tied to what we call cptsd, but to me cptsd is sort of a death in another guise. And to just have it, illogical as it sounds, and to put it in my heart each day, is what I strive for. My box of pain is still there, close to the flame of hope. But...sounds easy, and then...

I get wildly discouraged...lately I've fallen into a sleepless pattern where the attempt to rest falls apart as memories revive my own cptsd scars, haunting my quest for peace. Why? Why? Why? ...the hope always seems just...out of reach. It comes into view and then fades, sometimes well beyond the progress I thought I'd made, so eagerly, so desperately fought for, so easily gone.

You know what I mean, and it's nice to be on this site where those explanations aren't always necessary. So my question for you is, simply, what's your take on the hope conundrum? Is it always up ahead, or like Zach, can we indeed hope, anyway?   

Dutch Uncle

Thanks for your post, woodsgnome.

Hope is a difficult concept for me. I've also struggled with the hopelessness of hope at times (as it seems to me you are too).

Last year a new view on hope was presented to me. Someone defined hope as 'active waiting'.
I'm still struggling to get my head around what this actually means, but somewhere deep down I feel there is truth in the statement.

I used know hope as a passive thing. Not much more then riding out whatever misery I was in, because at some point it would all have passed and *pouf* out-of-the-blue something good would emerge. That 'real' hope would emerge, something I could truly believe in, work on/work with. A light on the end of the tunnel. And that 'Hope' was the means to actually get that far.

I am now tempted to think that such 'hope' is actually resignation.

Possibly a key thing that I need to learn now (if I am to fully embrace the concept of 'actively waiting' = hope) is that I can/am allowed to lose hope. I can, and am allowed to, to stop actively waiting for something that I at sometime discover to being "waiting for in vain".
If I have lost the idea I can 'actively wait' for something, i thus have lost hope.
And that can be OK.

I can then 'actively wait' for something else.
I may then have found new hope. New in the very essence of the word.
Hope for something completely different.

I'm not sure if this makes any sense.
Like I said, I'm still trying to get my head around it.
It's a paradigm-shift. And I have not arrived at the new core. But something inside me says the old core is over and done with. And I can be 'better' because of it.

I hope (for lack of a better word) this helps...


Wishing you the best  :hug:

Trees

I lost all "hope" long ago.  I was reduced to trying to reduce the constant suffering inside my head, the screaming howling black chaos.  For years there were was no peace at all.  Then somehow a few seconds of peaceful acceptance would emerge occasionally.  And I got gradually better at cultivating it, what I would call "peaceful acceptance".  Perhaps that is the same thing as "resignation", but I prefer the sound of "peaceful acceptance".  I think it somehow incorporates the concepts of self nurturance and cherishing any split second spent outside of the pain.

woodsgnome

Thank you, BeHealthy, Hysperger, and Trees,

I think parts of all of your commentary reflects what I saw in the Zach Sobiech story I described, where he had no practical hope, but still expressed his zest for life by doing "some crazy stuff", as he put it. While he inspired hope in others, for himself it became irrelevant, mute, something he didn't need or control. But he could still live, accepting it, and expressing himself despite his condition.   

In several respects, hope doesn't really make much sense anyway, it's just kind of a tape running in the background someplace and we don't really know what it is or what to make of it. We express it as a wish, can sincerely think we have it, or pine for it when it seems elusive. But it's only in the living that we truly express it. Perhaps the word "hope" is even a trap in that regard.

As Trees says, "cherishing any split second spent outside of the pain" cycles what we call hope back to square one. In the end, the striving for something else won't make that much difference, and the peace of accepting it isn't a defeat, a giving up of hope; rather it's an embrace of the life we're here with, right now, and no amount of idle or even the  speculation we call hope changes that. It's the nature of our humanity.

And yes, a big part of the acceptance carries the pain we've encountered. Elsewhere, in the cafe section, I posted a quote I came upon just the other day that hit home: "The smart have their books. The wise have their scars." (Wayne Wirs). The overwhelming grief and anxiety that looms so large in our cptsd journeys can thus be deemed a gift, I suppose--some well-meaning people even suggest that it is.

But "gift" is an even worse word trap ("oh cool, I got this pain called cptsd and it's just what I wanted; hit me again, I like gifts"). In that context, I hate that word--I don't feel grateful for any of it, but it showed up on  life's agenda. And so I wander on.

Thanks again for nudging me along the path. Your musings and counsel makes the steps easier.