On losing hope

And how pessimism might serve us

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

I hit my edge after Supreme Court zealots upended women’s rights, the EPA’s power, the separation of church and state, and made people’s desire to carry a weapon more important than our children’s safety. As the world tilted away from sanity, obscuring what I understand as just, moral, correct, the waters of grief began to submerge me.

Underwater, I swam through shock, anger, sadness, horror. My intellect could not be reached through the emotional response I could not tame. I wished to be more pragmatic, like my husband Eddie, who reminded me that we are in California, that everything is fine for us now. Fine. A word that doesn’t make sense to my American sensibility. A word that we’d never accept as a compliment (“You look fine.”) or for a dinner party (“Everything tastes fine.”). Fine was not acceptable. Fine, I knew, was a temporary state.

I’d been fine. And now I wasn’t. Should I dull my angst? Curb my rage? Mask my sadness? Rationalize the darkness away? Find intellectual routes to feel better?

On some level, I didn’t want to feel better. Feeling better, feeling okay, feeling content, or safe was what got us here. So I let myself feel the violation, the weight of the reality that all that had been worked for was now being systematically stripped away.

And you know what happened when I let in all those big emotions? When I let my heart feel hopeless? Defenses down, raw and ragged, I got COVID. For five days I sat isolated in my bedroom (on the mend, but still foggy) having to now face head on the illness I’d feared for years, the thing that stopped me from traveling, and made me wash the plastic wrap on my toilet paper when Eddie brought it home from the grocery. My fears finally happened.

And now that it has, I’m not worried about it anymore.

Pessimism can be your friend

While I was sitting in bed with COVID, just when I thought I couldn’t feel worse, two editors rejected my book. I’m used to rejection. In fact every year I make a goal to get 100 writing rejections a year—more rejections always means more acceptances; I mean, the year I started that goal I got my first byline in the New York Times.

Obviously, these rejections hurt—this was the closest the book has come to being accepted. But being ill, missing my son’s 15th birthday because of The ‘Rona, and feeling heartsick over the state of the world, put my little ego in her place. Maybe we don’t get what we want.

This summer I sure wasn’t getting what I wanted. I’d already had to cancel five trips due to family issues, illness and now The Rona. And as I sat in bed propped up on pillows I had to wonder if knowing we don’t get what we want means we don’t try.

Therapists say that a healthy dose of pessimism, or negative perspectives, can help us adopt a healthier way of living. Take the climate scientists who, despite knowing the realities of the future our children face, still have children. When you know, and accept, the ugliness of it all, can that help us live a little lighter?

I spoke with one therapist who admitted that knowing the immensity of what we’re up against helps her be more present with her kids and open to joy, because if things are actually spiraling downhill as it feels at the moment, the least we can do is enjoy what we have.

But to get to that point, friends, we also must be ok with not feeling great all the time. Grief is real. It’s wild and raw and transformative. And it’s not fun. But most any psychologist will contend that the only way over our grief is to walk through. Mental health professionals also say that grief work requires a strong support network.

This month’s action

Fed up with raging alone into the void, I called together a group of women to my backyard for wine, chocolate and cake. We railed against the Supreme Court, bemoaned our sadness and frustration, never attempting to make anyone feel better with false hope or optimism. We complained that fighting religious zealots is not what we need right now when we have to address our climate crisis above all else. Or guns. Or the separation of church and state. Or racial inequality. Or prisons. We all have our issue.

But that night, we weren’t yelling into a void. We weren’t forcing each other to see the positive. We were sharing our despair. We were listening. And in the end, we didn’t have a solution, but our hopelessness in the current system sparked in us the need to act. By the end of the night we weren’t generating any more anger, instead we were breeding ideas. Networks of women to help women, election actions we can take together, another gathering in other houses, spreading actions through book clubs.

Hopelessness brought us together. Love keeps us fighting. Togetherness gives us strength.

Friends, it’s fucking hard. But please don’t numb the anger and frustration. Find a healthy way to give into it, and share it with people who will help you process. And then find your lane and get back at it. I’ll keep writing and organizing, those are my skills I have to offer. Parents don’t have the luxury to give up, do we?

So right now, I’m going to stop writing into the void. I’m going to go sit outside and watch the hummingbirds suck nectar from the bottlebrush, and the swallows take a dirt bath, and the iridescent beetles flitter around the yard. And I’m going to be ok with not feeling hope about a lot of things right now, in service to being so fucking lucky to breath the air here right now.

Until next time when hopefully my COVID fog burns off…

~Michele