I’ve recently heard myself thinking: “There is no hope anymore. I refuse to allow myself to operate from hope from now on.” This is one of several revelations lately that has abruptly overthrown my understanding of myself as a woman, as a therapist, as a human being. What’s more, it’s toppled my relationship to life as I’ve known it thus far, turning everything on its head as I suddenly find myself confronting the script of my own identity, conferred to me by my given middle name, Heila, which means hope.
In sensing into this resolve more deeply within me, I wonder at the tone and fierceness of this particular voice that surfaces unbidden as I’m doing dishes. “From now on, I refuse to be fueled by the flimsy fumes of hope,” it continues, hunkered down behind a red line it will no longer cross.
Gingerly, I journey to the heart of this defiance, listening in for its message: The story of this earth and of our place in it is no longer a matter of hope or hopelessness. It no longer means straddling between a nonchalant “business as usual” mindset or a doomsday “we’re fucked” scenario. Yet the fact that there is no hope anymore doesn’t mean it is hopeless. It actually feels oddly liberating.
How do you remain sane in an insane world? It’s a question that’s had me reflect on what we’ve come to define as mental health and on our understanding of the therapeutic process itself. I wonder if I can be a party to this constructed charade any longer. I feel, exuberantly, at the edge of the precipice of my own liberation.
How on Earth do you make sense of the senseless? How do you make sense of the cultures of despair and biological extinction that fuel our drive to consume holding out the promise of a deferred mortality? How do we justify the zero sum game that would have a few thrive at the expense of the whole, of Life itself? How do we make sense of our favorite exports in the form of war, strife, market perforation, economic enslavement, military dictatorship and yet exhort those who suffer from the tear in the social fabric to “go home” and face the consequences of poverty, discord, homelessness and migration we’ve sown?
I wonder about the shreds of societal values that we content ourselves with, the narrow social norms we profess to live by or to stray from, the hypocrisy of normative behavior reinforced by religious or corporate institutions that never question the contexts of ecological, economic and spiritual sustainability. It is time to throw off the yoke.