Hope in an epoch of great change
A post by team member Julie Sutherland
I am deeply pleased about this new website, not simply because it looks gorgeous. (No thanks to me! I had no hand in that.) In fact, my delight is hardly about its design at all. My pleasure is because of what the site represents just now, in this dark time: a fresh start. Hope.
In weeks and months to come, we will have all sorts of special guest bloggers, and I can’t wait to introduce them to you. But today you’ve got me, and today I’ve got hope, so that’s what I’m going to write about.
I generally have a skewed view of hope. One that flies in the face of everything Emily Dickinson taught us about its power. If you don’t know her poem entitled ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’, you can read it here.
In this poem, Dickinson says that hope is a thing that ‘never stops’. That’s not the hope I know. The feathers on the hope I know often feel a bit damp. In fact, I wouldn’t use ‘feathers’ as a metaphor for hope. For me, hope’s in a ring with depression and it is seriously outclassed.
But I know my relationship with hope needs a good therapist—one who might tell me that the blood bath inherent in my own metaphor is part of the problem. When the metaphor’s not working, change the metaphor. So for the rest of this post, I’m going to use Emily Dickinson’s imagery rather than mine.
To apply her perspective to the fresh start the new website heralds: my hope has found its feathers and is taking flight. It is gaining speed. It is releasing endorphins and keeping adrenaline in check. It is flying into the stone-cold face of my depression and shattering it like so much fragile glass. (Did my metaphor just try to re-emerge?)
And what a thing to feel in this period of great uncertainty. At a time of loss and fear. In an age where depression has a tendency to find the path of least resistance and dive-bomb in.
It’s hard to describe the all-consuming nature of depression to someone who’s never experienced it. In fact, it’s hard to describe at all. This is one of the reasons why poets are so important to me. They find words for things the rest of us often struggle to articulate. One of my heroes, Stephen Fry, said this about how invigoratingly nimble poets can be:
‘And poets can refresh an experience completely. And yet, it's something we've always known. And it is a tremendous thing. That all art can do, but I think poets do it somehow better than anyone, is to take you to a place that you've always known. And you've never dared go, or you've never realized was available for you to go’.
Poets uncover language we couldn’t access and assure us we are not alone. Shakespeare found words for me, to describe the cycle of self-alienation, self-isolation, self-pity and self-loathing that depression perpetuates. If you don’t know Sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’), you can read it here.
The poet writes about weeping alone, troubling deaf heaven with his bootless (‘ineffectual’) cries, finding no pleasure in things he used to like, and coming close to self-hatred.
But, he ends the sonnet with an exploration of hope. What lifts the poet in Sonnet 29 out of the depths not just of despair but (I would argue) of genuine depression is the thought of his beloved:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
His thing with feathers is thoughts of the person he loves. Of course, love might not inspire hope in us. (Full disclosure: love often, but not always, saves me from myself.) If not love, what? What gives us hope when we have none? This is a span where many of us have more time than we are accustomed to. Can we engage in activities that reinvigorate us and give us courage to go on? This may require sitting down and reflecting on what we believe we do well. If we come up dry upon reflection, can we ask others to tell us what we do well? Can we believe them? Can we play to these strengths during this time? Can we dust off dreams that have gathered cobwebs in the corners of our mind, act on them and feel some of the despondency subside?
Absolutely not, you might say—or rather, that great demon depression might say for you. For, here is where depression may rear its truly hideous head. It might threaten us with an onslaught of memories of our own failings (wrongly or rightly perceived). It might taunt us mercilessly with our missteps and deficiencies. It might say there is no thing with feathers for us. What can save us then?
All I can tell you is that this belief that we are beyond saving is a lie. Our self-perspective is altered by the deceits depression feeds us. We are not our depression. Nobody defines us by our depression except for ourselves. It is external to us. It is a dark shade that overwhelms us and threatens to consume us, but our fate is not inevitable. There are so many great mentors who are on the other side of depression and whose writings are testaments to each human’s potential to overpower it. One of my mentors is Matt Haig whose experience with depression led him to nearly kill himself when he was 24. But he didn’t. He lived and shared his experience. About his book, Reasons to Stay Alive, he says, ‘the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong’.
I want to circle back where I began: with this new website and the hope it summons. Hope is a thing with feathers. It will keep fluttering its wings, whether we feel them or not. But hope is also ‘a verb with its sleeves rolled up’, to borrow from the professor of environmental studies, David Orr. Hope doesn’t do our job of finding new life for us any more than fortune really favours the bold. It’s the other way around. We have to summon the courage to act (so much easier said than done), and hope follows so quickly after that we may think it was the catalyst rather than the result. How do we summon courage? What strengthens our resolve? It may be meditation or martial arts or dancing or cooking or walking or laughing with friends. Sometimes we may need medication to tap into our most authentic, courageous selves (counterintuitive but true).
Maybe naming the thing that gives us courage (and its beloved relative, hope) when we’re in a good patch and writing it down so we can find it when we feel we aren’t strong enough or good enough to face the future would be a good first step. Then we can turn to it in the rough patches and act on it and feel brave and perceive hope.
Before this pandemic, there were others. One in my living memory is AIDS, a disease so mired in politics and hate that to this day the stigma lingers for those who faced it head-on. But when the worst was over, the people whose worlds it had toppled—mothers and lovers and children and friends and survivors—began to rebuild. They looked at the rubble of their lives, rolled up their sleeves and dug in. In Angels in America, a powerful play about AIDS in the United States while it was at its most devastating, the young, AIDS-afflicted Prior offers a blessing to the audience. It’s a blessing that has much resonance for each of us now, as we emerge into a new world—a world that will require courage and hope and hard work. Please accept his words as my benediction: ‘Bye now. You are fabulous creatures. Each and every one. And I bless you: More life. The Great Work Begins’.
