Hope and Change

The title of this post implies that this post will get political in a hurry.  But, I do not want to talk about the president.  I want to talk about why those two themes were such a powerful campaign message.  And I think it is because they are such a powerful human message.

Without hope, without believing in the possibility that things can change for the better, many of us would have a hard time continuing to live.  Personally, I am plagued by an overwhelming fear of other people.  It is something my brother has said that he faces, too.  Our father used to physically and verbally abuse us based on unpredictable and sometimes unavoidable offenses.  Spilling milk was not anything to cry over, but his fury that we spilled the milk certainly was.  Trying something new was particularly scary.  Folding laundry, cleaning bathrooms, and mowing lawns had to be done the way that he subjectively believed was correct, sometimes without any instruction, or he could fly off the handle.

So, I am scared of everybody.  I am scared that every new person I meet might find my idiosyncrasies so upsetting that they will physically hurt me.  And I am afraid that everything I do at work will meet with revulsion, rejection, and cruel words.  I worry that, even if my way of doing things makes more sense, I will be punished for not doing things the way other people prefer.

I do not think that I could survive if I thought that there was no chance that I could reprogram my psyche to lessen the daily terror that I feel.  Without hope that things will get better in my head, that the mindfuck my father pulled on me during my childhood is not immutable, I think that I would just curl up into a ball and cry until I wasted away and died.

But, for better or worse, I cling to the hope that things can change.  When my grip on that hope is strongest, I am usually at my best, and life is not so bad after all.  When I am hanging off the edge of that hope, dangling on a cliff abutting the ocean of my despair, I tend to shut down.  My grip starts to slip.  And I am fortunate that I have had so many good people in my life to grab me by the wrists and haul me back onto solid ground.  I know that not everybody is that lucky.

But, even living in hope can be exhausting.  The fear I hold inside wears on me.  It holds me back from immersing myself in the small joys and great opportunities of my life.  And I think then about Epicurus, and how he allegedly said that the greatest of all pleasures is the complete absence of pain.  And I think that anybody who has suffered knows the truth of that.  So I will keep chipping away at this cancer inside of me, by emotional surgeries, or chemotherapy, and sometimes even by snake oil and witch doctoring.  And while I may stumble and weep with exhaustion at times, I will cling to hope desperately.  Even though I stumble and lie motionless, face down in the earth and loam, may I always push up slowly, my muscles aching, to trudge on until my burdens are lighter.  Or until I am stronger.