Pain says:
“This is unbearable.”
Hopelessness adds four words:
“And it will never end.”
Those four words can change everything.
Human beings can endure extraordinary difficulty when they believe there is an end somewhere ahead.
A terrible flight feels different when you know you will land in two hours.
A brutal workweek feels different when Friday is coming.
A painful medical procedure feels different when someone tells you, “Ten more minutes.”
The pain is real.
But it has a boundary.
There is a future on the other side of it.
Take away that boundary, and the same suffering can feel completely different.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons hope has such extraordinary power.
Hope does not necessarily make today’s pain smaller.
It makes today’s pain temporary.
And sometimes knowing that something is temporary is what gives us the strength to carry it.
The Sentence That Changes Everything
Listen carefully to what people say when they lose hope.
“My marriage will never get better.”
“I will always be alone.”
“My child will never change.”
“I’ll never recover from this.”
“My life will always be like this.”
Notice the language.
Never.
Always.
Forever.
Those aren’t descriptions of the present.
They are predictions about the future.
And that raises a question I think we should ask much more often:
What evidence do we actually have for the word “forever”?
You know what today feels like.
You know what yesterday felt like.
You may even know what the last six months felt like.
But none of us has visited next year.
None of us has seen five years from now.
Hopelessness takes evidence from the past and present and quietly extends it across a future that has not happened yet.
“This keeps happening” becomes “this will always happen.”
But those are not the same sentence.
Your Mind Has Made This Prediction Before
This is where I want you to do something unusual.
Don’t ask someone else to give you hope.
Don’t begin with inspirational quotations.
Don’t even begin by telling yourself that everything will be okay.
Instead, become an investigator of your own life.
Take out a piece of paper.
Write down three times in your life when you genuinely believed something would never get better.
Not minor inconveniences.
Think of periods when you really felt trapped.
Maybe you were heartbroken.
Maybe you were terrified about money.
Maybe you were lonely.
Maybe you were fighting with someone you loved.
Maybe you were going through a crisis at work.
Maybe something happened that you thought you would never emotionally recover from.
Write down what was happening.
Then, underneath each one, write the sentence you were telling yourself at the time.
“This isn’t going to end.”
“Nothing is going to change.”
“I don’t see how this can possibly get better.”
Now ask yourself:
What happened?
Maybe it didn’t resolve the way you wanted.
Maybe it took much longer than you hoped.
Maybe life didn’t return to what it had been before.
But did the future look exactly the way you predicted?
Are you still standing in precisely the same emotional place?
In many cases, the answer will be no.
Something changed.
You changed.
Circumstances changed.
Someone entered your life.
Someone left it.
An opportunity appeared.
A problem resolved.
You adapted.
You learned something.
Time did something you couldn’t imagine time doing while you were trapped inside the moment.
Now comes the most important part of the exercise.
Go back to what you believed then.
Why were you so convinced it would never get better?
You probably had reasons.
It has already been six months.
Nothing has changed.
I’ve tried everything.
Every day is the same.
Why would tomorrow suddenly be different?
Those reasons probably felt compelling.
And yet the future eventually refused to cooperate with your prediction.
Now Look at Today
Perhaps you’re going through something difficult right now.
And your mind is saying:
This time is different.
This has gone on too long.
Nothing is changing.
I’ve tried everything.
Why should next month be any different from this month?
Stop there.
Look at your paper.
Didn’t your mind use remarkably similar reasoning before?
That’s the question.
Not:
“Can I prove everything will work out?”
You can’t.
Neither can I.
The question is:
“Can I prove that it won’t?”
That is very different.
Hopelessness often demands certainty from hope while granting certainty to despair for free.
Hope has to prove the future.
Hopelessness merely announces it.
Why?
If you cannot know with certainty that everything will become better, how can you know with certainty that nothing will?
“I Can’t See a Way” Is Not “There Is No Way”
This may be one of the most important distinctions we can make when life becomes dark.
I cannot see a way out.
There is no way out.
Read those sentences again.
They feel similar.
They are not.
The first is a statement about your current field of vision.
The second is a statement about the entire future.
You are qualified to make the first statement.
None of us is qualified to make the second.
Because some of the things that will change our lives haven’t happened yet.
Some of the people who will help us haven’t arrived yet.
Some of the opportunities we will eventually take don’t exist yet.
Some of the strength we will need hasn’t been discovered yet.
Some solutions only become visible from a place we haven’t reached yet.
Not seeing a path is not evidence that no path exists.
Sometimes it only means you’re standing too early in the story to see it.
Hope Is Not Pretending Everything Will Be Fine
This is where hope is often misunderstood.
Hope is not:
“Everything will definitely work out.”
Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want.
Hope is not denial.
It isn’t pretending pain isn’t painful.
It isn’t painting a smile over devastation.
Hope can be much more intellectually honest than that.
Hope can simply say:
“I do not know what happens next.”
That sounds almost unimpressive.
It isn’t.
Because hopelessness says:
“I already know.”
It will always be like this.
Nothing will change.
There is no way.
Hope doesn’t have to defeat that prediction with another prediction.
It can simply challenge its authority.
You don’t know that.
Sometimes those four words are enough to reopen the future.
You Don’t Need Hope for the Rest of Your Life
There is another mistake we make.
When someone feels hopeless, we ask them to imagine an enormous transformation.
Imagine being happy again.
Imagine your whole life repaired.
Imagine everything working out.
But when someone cannot see past Tuesday, asking them to believe in a beautiful life five years from now can feel almost insulting.
So don’t.
Shrink the assignment.
You don’t need enough hope for five years.
You need enough hope for the next step.
Don’t ask:
“Can I believe my entire life will change?”
Ask:
“Can I accept that something might change?”
Don’t ask:
“Can I see the finish line?”
Ask:
“Can I take one more step without knowing where the finish line is?”
Hope does not always arrive as a blazing light at the end of a tunnel.
Sometimes hope is simply refusing to declare the tunnel endless.
Look at Your Evidence
Return to that piece of paper.
Three moments.
Three crises.
Three times your mind looked at what was happening and projected it indefinitely into the future.
And yet here you are.
Perhaps scarred.
Perhaps changed.
Perhaps still carrying pieces of what happened.
But here.
Your own life has already taught you something about your ability to predict forever.
You aren’t very good at it.
None of us are.
So perhaps the next time your mind tells you:
“This has happened again and again. Why should it ever end?”
answer with another question:
“How many times have I asked that exact question before?”
And then:
“How many of those things actually lasted forever?”
Your past cannot guarantee that today’s problem will disappear.
But it can destroy one dangerous illusion:
that because you cannot see the ending, there isn’t one.
The Future Has Surprised You Before
Think about how many parts of your current life you could not have predicted ten years ago.
People you hadn’t met.
Places you hadn’t been.
Decisions you hadn’t made.
Problems you didn’t know you would survive.
Joy you didn’t know was coming.
Pain you didn’t know would eventually become bearable.
Life has repeatedly entered rooms you thought were sealed shut and opened doors you didn’t know were there.
Why should the future suddenly lose that ability now?
Maybe hope is not the conviction that tomorrow will be wonderful.
Maybe it is something quieter.
Something more defensible.
Something strong enough to carry us through one more night.
The willingness to admit that tomorrow has not happened yet.
Your pain may be real.
Your fear may be justified.
Your exhaustion may be enormous.
But “this hurts” is not the same sentence as “this will hurt forever.”
“I don’t know how this changes” is not the same sentence as “this cannot change.”
“I can’t see the way” is not the same sentence as “there is no way.”
And perhaps when hope feels impossible, we don’t need to force ourselves to believe that everything will be okay.
Perhaps we need only remember how many times we were certain that something would never end…
and then somehow lived long enough to see that it did.
You don’t have to know what the future holds to have hope.
You only have to stop pretending hopelessness knows.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
