Balancing hope with reality

How can we remain positive when everything feels gloomy?

I’m watching the dust search the air for somewhere to settle. Golden light is streaming through my windows and… God! I’m describing my bedroom as I’ve found, blank sheet brain, that I have nothing to say. Though that’s not strictly true, there’s a tangle of thoughts, overlapping each other and I want to make something out of them, extract a lesson. But I can’t. So all I can do is try to splurge everything down on the page, spread it all out for you to consume. 

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I have a rough plan of what I’ll publish each week and, often, I’m taken off track and feel the pull to write about something else. This week is no exception. I have an interview with an incredible woman that I’ve been itching to share, as I learned so much from her, but feel - somehow - that I do, despite proclaiming otherwise, need to talk about myself. I just don’t know where to begin. 

I spent Wednesday night wandering the streets, poly pocket posters in hand, yelling - my breath coming out of me in frosty smoke - my cat’s name. He’s been missing a week now and we’ve done all the things you’re meant to: pestered our neighbours, harnessed the frightening and efficient power of community Facebook groups, phoned cat shelters… I even, this morning, scattered the contents of our hoover all around the garden, hoping the scent will pull him home. While we tacked up the posters, we called his name. I hadn’t expected it to be so exhausting. As every time we did so, “Big Love! Big Love!” there was this tiny molecule of hope released that he’d come running out, miaowing, and Ian would scoop him on his shoulder. I could almost see it. I tried to will this into being. But, of course, nothing. We went home defeated, ate chocolate orange desserts and climbed into fresh sheets. Both things I’d anticipated could cheer us up, just a little, afterwards. 

I’m a hopeful person. A glass-half-full, gratitude journaling type who teeters on the edge of toxic positivity. I’m also someone who - due to their past and also, I guess, a grounding in this world - knows that bad things happen. All the time. That, despite what manifesting TikToks might tell me, I hold very little control over my reality. Big Love might be trapped somewhere, starving. He could be dead. And, in the grand scheme of things, that harsh reality is sad, but also small. 

Life is getting harder. I’m in my late thirties now and my friends and I are grappling with the huge adult issues that felt so alien, and far away, in our twenties. Friends parents are getting sick, friends themselves are too, there’s mental health issues, addiction, relationship break-ups, friendship break-ups, fertility issues… As I type  all of that out the phrase “life sucks and then you die” pops into my head. That’s not me! I hate that phrase. But how do we balance holding out hope for the wondrous, beautiful things when - at so many turns - we’re shown that shit really does happen?

As the night went on, with every tiny sink of the stomach each time we yelled “Big Love” and he didn’t appear, I did begin to question the point of us being out at all. Each hopeful thing I said felt like building a step on a ladder, that we’d inevitably fall off later. By making it taller the smack-down to reality was only going to be greater. Shouldn’t we just accept he’s dead? It will make it easier when the news arrives, right?

 

But pessimism doesn’t make the arrival of bad news any easier. It just makes the wait for it even worse. Yet, excessive optimism is also damaging. 

A positive outlook is not a genie-in-a-bottle, it’s not a cure for cancer. I believe it can make you appreciate your life in a more golden way, but it can’t change things. I think of Samantha saying to Carrie in Sex and The City: “I could die Carrie. Let me talk about my fears.” For those who haven’t seen the show (um, you should) Samantha has breast cancer and, for the entire episode, Carrie has been insisting that she’ll be fine, and, in the process, silencing her friend facing the very real possibility of death. 

We shy away from talking about grief and death as we think it will make them easier. We’re often shoving our fingers in our ears and yelling LALALALALALA as loud as we can, pretending that will make them go away. But - and GOD KNOWS I’VE TRIED - ignoring the darkest parts of our reality only makes things worse. 

I want to give my friends, my family, anyone reading this, the space to talk about their fears. I want to give that to myself. But I also want to give hope, to believe in magic. How? It’s so easy to absorb all the horrors, let them pollute our blood, think that’s it. “Life sucks and then you die.” 

Except it doesn’t, does it? Not all the time, any way. The sun has almost set now, I can no longer see the dust. It looked so pretty and now it’s gone. But I’ve got a spare chocolate mousse, to eat under the covers. A bowl of pasta and some red wine with a friend awaits me later. There are little joys and there are big joys. I became an aunt for the third time this week. 

Tomorrow news might come that will shroud all of that in black, that’s happened before, it will happen again. It could be Big Love related or it could be another totally unexpected meteor strike. We’re all waiting for bad news. If we’re not waiting we’re navigating the dark shadows of it. But we’re also all waiting for good news. Or dancing within its shimmer. Most of the time we’re doing both, jumping from shadows to shimmers.

I’m searching for a balance between the two but nothing can stop that constant wobble. 

Wow! Turns out I did have something to say. I was prepping this letter to send out, as usual, on Sunday but I’m scared if I hold onto it, something might change and I won’t be able to see that joyful wobble of light and dark, I’ll only be able to see the dark. So I’m sending it out a little early. As always I’d love to hear your thoughts. I hope I made sense!

Other things I’ve done this week include a sleep-out to raise money for the homeless (oh this feels cheeky but the link is here if you want to donate) and I also celebrated the release of my Radio Play for (FANCY) Radio Four. You can listen here.