Hope Addiction

Hope is a tenuous thing. Too much and we lose connection with the present.  Not enough, and we can't see our way out of the present. To be healthy and focused and living well, we need a good balance of hope at the right dose.

I admit that I have been a hope addict. I have used hope to get me through times when I knew down deep that life wasn't ok.  However, because i couldn't put my finger on it, and couldn't see through the haze, it was easier to just hope that things would get better somewhere in the undefined future.
The hope of a new move, a new baby, my husband's potential promotions, a new church, new friends, new clothes, losing weight; putting hope in some change that I longed to come and fix the gnawing empty wound that was slowly killing me.

I had a difficult marriage.  I always knew that something was off, but I never quite could identify what it was.  I smiled, and worked, and prayed, and served and sliced through the nagging uneasiness with the sharp knife of hope towards the future.  It became my drug. I would create lists in a desperate hopeful attempt to blot out the drowning despair that crouched at my door.  I would write dreams and hopes and plans on pages of wishful dreaming; from my plan to get out of debt, to where we would move next, to baby names. I never had my footing in my relationship, never felt free to completely be who I was, and so I numbed that void with hope. I hoped my way into a messy marriage, a hurting heart and eventually the biggest blow you can get from your spouse.  It was over.
I often wonder how long it would have taken me to see and hear the truth had I allowed the reality of the pain I had been trying to avoid set in years ago.

Without hope, despair and depression sets in.  Feeling hopeless creates a desperation and drowning in our spirits that longs for relief.  Hope is the elixir to protect us from the raw scrape of present circumstances. Hospital halls are coated in hope.  Loved ones walk the corridors deep in prayer and throwing their last hope to the wind with the expectation that faith will catch their hope and swing into action to fix whatever ailment they are fighting. The hope of healing and change sustains them. It can be a good thing.

Unfortunately, hope can also prevent us from growth. The continual waiting for things to get better mimics forward motion but is actually an effort to escape the recognition of a sometimes difficult reality.

Hope can be used to avoid. Escape. Deny. Soothe. Numb.  It can become the drug of choice in difficult situations and while useful for a time, it can eventually sabotage an entire life.  If you never fully engage in your present reality but instead use hope to escape it, you can look back and realize that a decade was lost while you waited and hoped for things to get better.

There is a fine line between having hope in a person, or circumstance, or relationship and avoiding the reality of brokenness. hope is an inherently good thing, and yet because it is good, and because it can allow us to believe that we are acting and engaging, it is also dangerous.  When mindlessly applied to your life it can blur the boundaries between your reality and what you wished your reality was.  It can morph from sacred, sustaining hope into devious and deceit-filled wishful thinking.

I am not hopeless. I am not advocating despair or bleak realism. But. I am now a crusader for truth.  Hope can be used to protect a lie.

Just as with other dependencies, the trouble starts when we use hope to avoid our present reality for too long.  We can abuse hope by using it in such a way that can prevent us from change or even to sink into the healing reality of pain.  I am just beginning to explore what this hope addiction means to me and to others... I believe that many of us are in a cycle of hope addiction and that there is a better way.  It has been a joke in my family that I have always been the perpetual Pollyanna, but in the destruction of a life i had protected for far too long, I now cautiously am moving towards the title of recovering idealist.  I am still a hopeful person. I still look for the best in people and circumstance, but I am learning to sit in the ache of reality more intentionally, knowing (with scared hope) that this too shall pass. I am learning to engage in this life without the powerful addiction to hope.