Not Hope, But Something That Keeps Going

I am not generally a hopeful person, to be honest.

Most of my life has been surviving hit after hit. Other people sometimes read that survival as hope, but I experience it more as endurance. Something that shaped me into being hypervigilant, cautious, and a little estranged from the ease that others seem to move through the world with.

There is a way that survival can get mistaken for resilience in a way that feels inaccurate from the inside. It is not always something that feels strong. Sometimes it just feels like staying alert long after the danger has passed, or moving through the world as if it might turn at any moment.

At times, when I see people moving through life with lightness, I want to interrupt it. Not because I want to take it from them, but because I do not understand how it exists so easily. I want to say, “don’t you know the horrors of life?” Maybe they do. Maybe they are carrying their own versions of that knowledge and still find ways to hold hope anyway. But that has never been something I could access in the same way.

The world has never felt safe to me. And moving through it has required adaptations that were often pathologized, medicated, and labeled as wrong. Over time, that shapes something deeper than behavior. It shapes your relationship to possibility itself. It makes it harder to imagine the world as something that can be softened, or held differently, or trusted.

So hope has never been a natural place for me to land.

I have heard hope described as a discipline, something people can learn to practice over time. I have even repeated that line at times. But it has never fully fit my experience. It assumes a kind of access I do not always have.

What has been more accurate is something closer to endurance. Something that does not assume goodness in the world, but keeps moving through it anyway because there is no other way to move.

And I think I have learned to be honest about that, not as a failure of outlook, but as a lived response to what the world has actually been.

I also want to acknowledge the people in my life who have held hope for me, even when I could not. Sometimes I have felt grateful for it, and sometimes I have felt irritated by it, and still I know it is something that has carried me in ways I could not carry myself.