Hope as a Discipline
My essay for 100 Days of Creative Resistance, a beauty rec, some thoughts about skincare, and the vulnerability of building a business
Hello dear readers,
I wanted to share this essay here in case it missed you. I was so honored to contribute to the newsletter series 100 Days of Creative Resistance that began on inauguration day and is still continuing. Visit the archive here for a list of AMAZING writers sharing inspirational thoughts and practice for our trying times. I loved writing this and hope one day all of these beautiful pieces will form an anthology.
So today I’ll share that essay, and at the end I’ll offer a few recommendations and recent thoughts and delights. So happy to be connected with you! I’m also writing a bigger post for you all about burnout, which I hope will be relatable and helpful.
100 Days Essay
A long time ago, when I was twenty years old, I was faced with a choice. I knew that if I kept drinking the way I was, I would die or I would kill someone else. These seemed like inevitable outcomes to the way I was living, even to me. I lived in a scary world of desperately not wanting to drink, but finding myself drinking anyway–the definition of insanity. The choices were that I could stop drinking and live, or keep drinking and die. I was scared. When you are faced with life and death like this, choices narrow. I am glad to say that deep down, I wanted to live. But in order to do so, I had to cultivate a hope out of nowhere that things could be better than they were. This was not hope in the Hallmark card sense. Nothing about it was fun, easy, or light. It was a hope I had to scrounge from the deepest place in me, and it was vital if I wished to survive.
Recently I was reading the stunning memoir by Katharine Blake, The Uninnocent. In one of the book’s early lines, Blake writes: “I didn’t yet know that hope is nothing less than a discipline.” (A quote that echoes Mariame Kaba’s famous “hope is a discipline” tweet, which Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya riffed on in his 100 Days piece.)
Yes, I thought. Hope is the discipline I have had to learn to hone all these years since I became sober. It’s so easy to give up hope. To say we are a ruined country. To stop writing completely. To give yourself over to despair as if your despair is doing something. Sometimes it is. Grieving is important and part of the process. Despairing over the political landscape and the ever changing news cycle that only seems to get more dire and bizarre is important too, because we are human. We need to cycle through our human reactions lest we bury them in our bodies only to manifest back out as disease. But we can’t only do that, and we can’t do that for very long. We have to return to hope.
Maybe it’s helpful to understand that I see hope as less of a feeling and more of an action. If I am full of hope then I am more able to see what is needed in my community. If I believe things can be better (this belief is the discipline) then I am interested in wondering what my part in that betterment might be. But if I stay in despair then I will not want to move. I will not continue to create. And in that discontinuing, I will die.
The personal is always political. I will never believe that our writing is meaningless. In a community everyone is bestowed with unique gifts. In a healthy ecosystem we are all contributing our gifts and receiving the gifts of others. Who are you to deprive another suffering soul your gifts in our most needful hour?
For me, what I worry about most in these turbulent times has to do with what goes on inside our homes. Statistics show that when the world gets more difficult, domestic violence increases. During lockdown there was not a day I didn’t worry for the individuals (mainly women and children) who were trapped at home with violent partners and parents. Even now, as the tenor of things feels distinctly terrifying for women, I worry about violence in the home increasing. Prices going up–I think of women being unable to flee their dangerous homes because of lack of resources. Women’s healthcare being taken away, I think of no one seeing the warning signs that something is wrong. The list goes on. This is why I write about violence in the way that I do. It’s not because I want people to feel depressed, it’s that I want them to find their own version of hope within the reality and to do that requires action.
There can be something addicting about misery. If we’re all miserable we can be miserable together and we can feel very busy in this misery business. But if that business doesn’t involve offering your gifts to the collective, then I’d question if you are really practicing the discipline of hope. My call to action for you today would be to figure out what the word hope means for you in terms of action. For me, it’s too overwhelming to imagine the entire suffering of the world. I become powerless in the face of it. But I can imagine the suffering in my community. I can find ways to pour into the community where I live both online and physically. I can recognize that writing is my gift and so to stop doing that would be depriving someone else of the healing magic it may contain for them.
Sometimes I feel the great press of time upon me. There doesn't seem to be enough of it to course correct this world. But I will never give up hope. To give up hope would be to die a spiritual death while living. I just don’t believe that’s the reason any of us are here.
So what might you do to pour hope into yourself this week (perhaps by engaging in your writing practice?) and what might you do to pour hope into your community (volunteering, helping a neighbor, calling a friend who has seemed down, having an important talk with your kid?). If hope is a discipline which I think we all know by now that it is, it means we have some power in this great equation. We can take our hope back and we can use it wisely. Don’t give your gifts away because the world seems bleak. Find the parts of the world that need the medicine only you can provide, and offer it.
As for my own offering, I’d love to invite you all to join The Fountain community, a platform for creative awakening that I’ve created with writer Kimberly King Parsons. It’s a haven for writers to continue to do work on the discipline of hope, self worth, and engage in a bright community off of Meta with other writers. We will be gathering for our first monthly class meetup on April 25th.
Recs and Thots
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I hope it was inspirational to you in some way. Writing these things down and sharing them in our current moment of so much noise, it’s hard to tell what, if anything, makes impact. Yet, I continue to write. I hope you are continuing the practices that light you up. In the end, we have to do it for us, and if it helps another, then even better. But that first part must be enough, too.
Okay, so I have never been a big skincare person in the sense that I know what I’m talking about. My take is that I want the routine to be minimal. I am really thinking a lot lately about the areas of my life where I just don’t care that much and this is kinda one of them. I was getting hydrafacials for a short stint and quickly decided I didn’t care enough to spend that money or that TIME. Were they nice, did my skin seem sort of glowy? Sure. But I just didn’t really give a big enough fuck to continue? I decided instead that time would be better spent in acupuncture and therapy. I sort of think like, my face is my face and this stuff has to really be relaxing or nurturing in some other way because the truth of the matter is the effects just aren’t gonna be that significant, ya know? And by in large, I don’t find treatments like facials and manicures to be all that relaxing. My esthetician was literally clicking her nails against an iPad the entire time during my red light therapy and i wanted to SCREAM.
BUT THAT SAID: I did order a vitamin C serum that I’ve been told is NECESSARY and I really like it! It’s nice. It makes my skin glowy and even. I like it so much I figured I’d share it here.
I want to do an entire post for books I’ve been reading but mainly I’ve been reading vintage spirituality texts that get presented me by the Universe in free libraries, or I’m reading something you cannot yet buy which feels cruel to tell you about, though I will say I am devouring a novel by
that has a scene in Target I won’t soon forget. I know you will one day love this novel too. It checks all my boxes: women on the edge, motherhood, past trauma coming back around, and told with style and edge.
Recently I joined the amazing poet
for a substack live (my first!) where we talked about the emotional journey of the writing career. I am so passionate that writers need SPECIFIC support as they navigate the rollercoaster of publishing your soul’s work. It ain’t the same as making a math spreadsheet, ya’ll.I hope you’ll check it out!
Right now I am mainly writing my new book in earnest and working on building a business, which has exercised SO many new muscles for me. I’m loving creating prompts and community content and I believe we’re building something beautiful in there. The coursework, to be frank, is life changing if you actually do it. It will touch every area of your practice and how you navigate career. Knowing this, though, I still have to fight the voice every day that tells me no one gives a fuuuuuuccccck. The stories are so easy to build around things like this when you are being vulnerable, putting yourself out there, and trying to be of value and service. But I’m nothing if not a healthy amount of delulu and believe anything I do can become successful if I just keep working at it.
Okay, I hope you are creating and staying hopeful wherever you are. Thank you for being here.
xx
C
Me! I give a fuck!
Thank you! For these sentences specifically:
“. . . we can feel very busy in this misery business. But if that business doesn’t involve offering your gifts to the collective, then I’d question if you are really practicing the discipline of hope. My call to action for you today would be to figure out what the word hope means for you in terms of action.”
Glad you are glowing!