Episode 41: Do You Have Hope?

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Let’s talk about hope. Sometimes it fuels you and other times it’s a four letter word. 

I get it, we are all dying by the day but when you have someone in your house that has a disease, death is maybe a fear that is around all the time. So when someone tries to help you see the hope in the world and you aren’t ready for it, or in the mood for it, it feels like it’s forced on you and makes you feel like you are doing something wrong.  

What people who aren’t caregivers don’t understand is, hope doesn’t always feel fuzzy and warm. Sometimes finding yourself with hope makes you very aware of your reality and for many of us that feels like a punch in the gut. It just sucks the air out of you and you find yourself unable to breathe.  

What each one of us hopes for depends on your outlook in life.  

I sit in a waiting room with my husband to see his oncologist and I hope they didn’t find anything new and that what is growing inside him hasn’t grown more and that he doesn’t need surgery. At the same time my husband can be sitting next to me hoping that things have grown enough so that he can finally have surgery to have something removed.  

Our hopes are the exact opposite.  

I am a glass half full kind of person but I will also question how good what’s in that glass will taste if I drink it. I can be hopeful and skeptical at the same time. Maybe that’s because enough has happened in my life for me to want to protect myself from hoping too much. Hope is vulnerable and it takes a certain amount of strength to be able to be hopeful but I think that it’s essential. We need hope in our lives.  

I can’t live without hope.  

I need to feel that positive things will happen for me and my family in the future. If I weren’t able to do that, my life would be more of a crap show than it already is. I need to know that if things are rough for me at any point in time I can get through it because there can be something better waiting for me on the other end of it. I can help my husband get through recovering from surgery because I have hope that he will feel better on the other side no matter how many sleepless nights I have in between now and then.  

I know how it feels not to have hope. I’ve had years of my life that seemed to keep getting worse and there have been times when I’ve wanted to give up hoping for something better. It just wasn’t possible to do. I know how it feels to really have hope and the crushing feeling when you realize it isn’t going to happen.  

I enjoy life in general and maybe that’s because I haven’t lost hope. I am confident that I deserve good things to happen to me… maybe that’s me being over confident. We all should be able to have hope. Hope that life can get better, that our loved ones can recover. That we will, at some point, be able to come up for breath during the times that feel suffocating for us.  

I think what the problem can be is that we don’t know what to focus our hope on.  

Maybe your husband is sure to die in the next week. Where is the hope there? You would like for him to survive and miraculously overtake what is slowly pulling him from you but you know, at this point, that won’t happen. So where is the hope there? That’s when it feels like. A four letter word. Maybe sometimes hope has to be smaller. Maybe it’s hoping you can spend some time with him today. Hope that he isn’t in too much pain. Hope that he will let go when he is ready and know that you will always love him. 

Maybe hope is what will pull you out of the darkness you are in. Allowing yourself to be open to the possibility that something good can happen for you and that you are deserving of that. Being hopeful requires us to think of the future. Sometimes we have to be present in the darkness to move towards that light of hope. To be able to do that you have to have the energy to get there. How do you find that? When life feels so dark how do you find the energy to still have hope? 

For me, when life weighs on me too heavily and I am surrounded by fear and anxiety it’s really hard to hope for things because I almost feel like I couldn’t take it if one more thing went wrong in my life. When that happens I know I’ve gone way too far without taking a break or just sitting in quiet because, let’s be real, when things get quiet the noise in your head can get really loud and everything you’ve been trying to avoid working through forces it’s way up. So I know that it’ll be uncomfortable at first but I find ways to go to a quiet spot of my house, or go out for a walk and just enjoy the quiet and if I need a pep talk this is where it happens. I’ll tell myself that, yes this sucks and yes I can do it.  

Then I go do it. Because life may feel like it’s harder for us but it isn’t impossible. If we can find a way to hope we can stay connected with what fuels us and helps us to continue as caregivers in this world. Maybe it’s just me but I feel that my brain is wired in a way now that when I have hope I have to silence the little voice that keeps wanting me to doubt the possibility of a good outcome. 

Find your way to hope.


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