hope (and the detox)
There is one word I have had a serious detox from in my life. And yes, it’s the title track of this post. Hope. Ah hope, a word both my conscious and subconscious brain had eaten a few too many times a day, too many days in a year and only half knew. Hope was at the centre of my survival skillset, but as a map, I hit a wall. And in hitting hard and falling flat on my bum, I had to ask the inevitable and kinda yuck question, how did I get here?
One of my favourite films of all time is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I love it so much I’ve named my puppy Gandalf (he comes in 10 days while I’m writing this!) and we’re going to be the next A-Team on the block. But there was one line that was said over and over during those 10 hours of film, “there is always hope”. I loved that line back in high school, but now I won’t eat those words on its own. It can be on the plate, just not the only ingredient. Why the vitriol? Not because I hate it, but because I got way too drunk on it. And I realised that I had to sober up.
Back in the day, I was a serious dreamer. Not having much opportunity to spend time on hobbies and things I might love, I shot for the second best thing, my imagination. There I could blissfully spend clock ticks doing whatever the hell I wanted and no one could have a say or worse, criticise. The future was a faraway place, but in my mind, I was both already there and didn’t need to worry about the mechanics of it. And outside imagination’s lair, I had you guessed it, Hope. Hope gave me a way to see outside the cards I was given, but it also gave me a map without any real life coordinates. Especially when the future wasn’t a far away place anymore, adulthood was here and I wasn’t doing the cracking job everyone thought I should be doing. Including me. I had bought too much of hope’s illusion, and I had to give it up unwillingly.
In sprinkles, hope reminds us that there are so many possibilities in the world. It reminds us that anything is possible, and it helps break down lines and laws that were once impossible and discriminatory. But it is a spark and not a pathway, it is a feeling and not an action. And these were the parts that I admittedly messed up. In pursuing goals, instead of building up work I was proud of, I scrambled doing random odd jobs hoping something would stick. I made bold moves that weren’t followed up by another one. I took big risks thinking the risk itself was enough to be rewarded. Heck, I even dated guys that clearly had a timebomb on them. Someone was going to give me a gold star for just trying right? The answer is no, ya bum! I hoped for something to work, something to change my current crappy course that turned out to be just a mouse wheel. But even vitamins have an expiry date. And this one was calling time.
Throughout my 20s, I made very little money. Romanticising the struggling artist trope, I figured that one day, this will pay off. Just keep doing the struggle, it will be worth it and it will be rewarded. I didn’t want to give in to a corporate structure of life, there had to be something more, I believed. When I started my own teaching business I started it out of necessity. A little more money and I could have more independence and freedom, even if it was a job I wasn’t yet so crash hot on. But something happened but I was paid by my very first client/student. Suddenly what I did was very real. It wasn’t just money, I realised I had a valuable product. I had actually made something of value. Something that I had unintentionally been working on in the background, part time, for 8 years up until that point. It wasn’t hope, it was real. And it was made by me.
Ever so slowly and still now, the future was becoming a real place, and I was becoming okay in it. I could stop the delegation of achievement to hope, and take the captain’s hat for myself. I didn’t need this old survival, nay, flight mode anymore. And I wasn’t just okay, I was becoming better.
I still love these movies, and I still know that hope has power. My cheer for Kamala Harris and how she has invigorated women and disenfranchised communities from across the pond is evident of that. But the next step is showing up. And that’s actually the most important part. Turning ideas into real things, into valuable things. I may still get lost in thought bubbles but there is a pathway back down to earth when it happens now.
And it’s right here.
Love, Maia
