When I was a little girl, I used to love reading, by myself and with my mother, to escape the painful reality of the life that I lived. I enveloped myself in what my dad accusingly called escapism, which is true, it was.
For me as a kid, life was hard. I was socially awkward, didn't know how to regulate my emotions, and had no idea how to fit in. I had an endless supply of toys, but no siblings, and learned how to entertain myself, which wasn't so bad. Most of the time.
School was a nightmare, where I was bullied for being that kid who used wet wipes to constantly guard against the invisible forces of unseen germs, a concept seven-year-olds weren't necessarily familiar with. My parents shopped at Walmart and Kmart, and my clothes weren't designer. We lived in a very blue-collar town where most of the families worked low-income jobs; there were many immigrants and people on the low-end of the economic scale. The kids from another of the local elementary schools called my specific neighborhood "the ghetto", which it wasn't.
Often my family was plagued with money issues, which I discovered later. My family went through a bankruptcy and we essentially lost our home. We sold in the summer of 2004 and I spent the first six weeks of high school homeschooling myself, between emailing and faxing my homework back to school, while my parents packed up our house and we waited for our real estate agent to close on the deal. We couldn't live in the new house until the owners agreed to a sale. I spent two days out of every week getting up at 530 in the morning, driving two hours into the town we would be living in, and staying in a hotel with my mom while I went to classes.
High school was rough, though there was less bullying to the same level as elementary and middle school, but the discord and abuse in my household remained quite steady. Verbal and emotional, neglect, intimidation, threats, gaslighting, guilt-tripping.
My favorite of my father's lines during a fight were either that he would leave us, or that he would kill himself, and then where would we be?
I grew up in an atmosphere of terror: of displeasing my father, everyone being a danger, a threat, someone to take advantage of you and cast you aside once they were done using you. So you learn to outsmart the other person, to never tell, anyone, ever, anything, about the family and your life, because people wouldn't understand.
Because they don't. People who have never been abused or grew up in abuse fundamentally do not understand the toll it takes on your mind and body, especially your outward trajectory of how you view people.
People either are intending to take advantage of you, or they already are. No one is safe to be trusted, because everyone, fundamentally at some level is the enemy.
I am close to 30 years old. I can remember the fear and panic of all the adults around me during 9/11.
I can remember not understanding the panic and scramble of the 2008 housing bubble, and condescendingly looking down on those people who were so daft as to be that irresponsible with their money and investments.
I barely remember the dot com bubble, which happened a few years before 2008.
But I remember the Recession that followed 2008. I remember being insulated with college, and resenting yet being grateful for having a job at a public library that allowed me to save up my money and begin to pay for my college classes and books. By my senior year, I paid the full tuition for both semesters out of my own pocket. I never took out a loan.
Through all this, I still loved books, but as I became older, I found little hope in them. The world did not resemble my books; people were not heroic and they certainly did not live the ideals their favorite heroes espoused. So I stopped reading, especially after college.
The Recession was hard though, after graduation. I had gotten onto the track to become a college professor and consider pursuing a doctorate in communications theory and publish papers. I collapsed in on myself, in resentment that I didn't really want to do that and was being pushed by my dad to become a news reporter and news anchor. The dream was to go and work for Fox News.
I was narcissistic, selfish, had an attitude and was angry all the time—I was not allowed to be angry, compared to the violence of my parents' own antics and histrionics. I had no reason to be bitter, volatile, and nasty. But I was. And the Recession made it hard to get a job in media, as newspapers were cutting down on staff and print advertising dried up. People stopped subscribing to a physical paper when it was so much easier to get the news instantly on the computer, and now, more and more on your phone.
Eventually, I landed two jobs over the next few years at media-related places. One was a newspaper. One was a magazine. Working in the industry made me jaded. News media is a place that attracts narcissistic, manipulative, hungry people. Read Snakes in Suits for a more complete understanding on corporate psychopaths.
I didn't have a religious upbringing. Contrary to what my friends or even my family may have perceived, God was a really distant concept. I didn't have an understanding of who Jesus Christ was until I reached my early 20s, and two of the men that I worked with, who were devout Christians, began to argue and defend the faith against my agnostic and hostile attacks.
In my early 20s, I began the slow, extremely painful process of conversion, a process which will probably take me the rest of my life.
For a long time, especially after I moved to the Washington D.C. area, I was very broken. I still am, as a Christian person, in many regards.
I was not chaste.
I was mean-spirited and gossipy.
I was resentful, racist, hateful.
Your sins and bad behaviors come to bear when you are confronted with truly good people, and then the shame and the guilt kicks in.
I did not attend church for almost a year, until I began attending a young-adult group, where for the first time in my life, I met real Catholics who took the faith seriously. They went to adoration, confession, weekly, even daily mass. People who had stellar, unblemished lives utterly in contrast to my own, and people who had been even more horrifically broken and scarred than myself.
These were people who had managed in some miraculous way, to overcome.
But how? How did they achieve this healing amidst their brokenness.
Hope.
Google defines hope as
That was something I didn't have. I didn't understand that concept. Growing up the way I did, I was expected to be tough, maintain a strong front, not cry. In some ways, I was raised a lot like a boy. My dad actually refused to let me wear dresses and treated me oftentimes like I wasn't a girl, but that's another conversation.
There is no "expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen", not when everything is impossible and dark.
Hope is an elusive concept for the lukewarm and the broken, whatever their level. It is undefinable when you exist in a self-made prison that the world is full of selfish, evil people who will use you if you don't protect yourself.
There are boogeymen in every corner. There are monsters in every bed. Sometimes, the monsters live in the same house; they're not under the stairs or in the boiler in the basement.
Where is the hope in tomorrow, if all these evils exist, if the monsters are the people you love, if the world is a danger and a threat at every turn?
The hope is not in man. Human beings are fallible, selfish, hypocritical, and downright manipulative and diabolical, and even at the best of times, there are always predators, in every school, church, level of government, and business.
Hope in man is foolish.
I found my hope when I learned to stop wallowing in my own self-pity. That required facing my dragons: it meant working through my abuse, sure. But it also meant learning new, healthy behaviors. It meant taking responsibility for my actions, to myself and to others, and my situation in life. Was I going to be selfish and angry, blaming everyone for how unsatisfying and awful my life had turned out?
It meant:
Not spreading gossip.
Learning to be charitable.
Striving to see Jesus Christ in people, whether they were Christians or not.
Not expecting other people to fix my problems, but also learning to ask for help in situations where I was really in need of advice or guidance.
Learning to trust in something greater than myself, a.k.a., God. Jesus Christ.
I realized a long while ago, that the suicidality, the abuse, the financial struggles, the Recession, the hard times—those came during childhood because they taught me valuable lessons to be tough, resilient, to think critically, to recognize real danger versus imaginary forces.
It gave me the patience for other people struggling, because sadly, some of us suffer more than others. Some people have a greater capacity for empathy. Others very little.
We experience greater trauma to be guides, to provide advice, comfort, reassurance, that the times are no harder than other times. We build on those foundations of strength for all the things we have gone through before to carry on, because that is where hope comes from, that it will get better. And we help others along, too, through God's grace working in our lives, that it is going to get better.
We learn to tell the difference between someone actually using us, someone lashing out and in pain, and someone who is thoughtless and didn't notice that they're insensitive. We learn.
It may not seem like it, but our brains and bodies have the capacity for great healing for many wounds. Study anything in neuroscience, about how trauma wires the brain, but also about how trauma can be rewired, with effort over time, to spiral up, rather than down, and the doubt of an intelligent creator begins to ebb away. In time, it gives way to hope.
Hope becomes wired into our bodies and our very brains when we begin to pause and reflect, and practice it over and over again. We reason, we consider, we review, we think. We let go of our trauma, because once we realize there is another path, we crawl slowly towards it. Some days we drag ourselves through; on others, we run full-blast, our hearts pounding a steady tattoo ready to explode from our chest with vibrance, love, and light, which we want to share. And that is joy. Joy and hope, that things have turned out, after the long darkness finally ends.
My hope comes from the example set by the amazing community of Christians that I met and made friends with in the three-and-a-half years that I've been living here. I thought the world was hard and nasty because that was what I was exposed to.
The world is still that way in many places.
But the people I met, who were patient with me in my healing journey from selfish rage to being a little hot-headed, was divine grace.
People taught me through their repeated behaviors, just their ways of living in the everyday, that while the world is rough and callous, not everyone, everywhere, is that way. They were kind. They listened, they cared when I cried or expressed that I was afraid or frustrated. And because of that patience, I learned to trust that they cared, and that it wasn't a lie or manipulation. That required hope, that my trust in them would not be betrayed or let down. It took courage.
Some did not have the capacity to walk because the flood of trauma I was pouring onto them was too great for them to bear.
Some did have that capacity, and the patience, to wait and walk alongside me as I learned to overcome my storms, to sort my pain, to live with and manage my PTSD. But it was incremental, and the speed of my healing did take several years.
But it required the courage to keep walking, fighting, and getting up everyday to go into a job I hated. It required that I keep trying to be patient and loving with myself, with the hope that someday, I would be a little less broken, and be less mistrustful of people's kindness and intentions toward me.
There are a lot of shitty people. I contend most people are some level of clueless, insensitive, and selfish, in varying degrees, because not everyone goes through the same thing. Your story is beautiful and wildly different from mine. As it should be, because we don't come to holiness as Christians by coming through the same paths.
My point is this:
The world isn't hopeless.
It is knowing that we live and die each day and the choices we make will determine our relationships as they ebb and flow, over years, accumulating second by second till we expire.
As a Christian...you get every moment, of every day, till the moment of your death, to repent, make a difference, be kind, and let God's grace work in you. That is the hope. That Christ saves us and loves us, despite our failings every moment of every day, and that we get up again. To fight. To comfort, provide, struggle, sacrifice, to love and cherish the gift that we are alive, right now, in this moment, this year, to witness the incredible works that He accomplishes.
My hope is in knowing that every day is a chance to help, in some small way, through prayer or kindness, by spreading information, or opening up to people, that yes, times are tough.
People are dying. But people are also living. Inventing and collaborating to find cures and workarounds for a very bureaucratically clogged system to get PPE items, masks, food, and donations to those most in need during this time.
My hope is in seeing the civic responsibility and sense of love well up in others because they see a need and rise to the occasion to fill it, without complaint or anger.
Hope can be fleeting, but it rises each day to show us how we can serve and sacrifice for the good of others. It is hope that people will fight, they will be cared for and loved, they will be able to make a difference, and that ultimately, they will care for us as well.
How will you understand your situation? As a time to despair, lament, and see no way forward?
Or is today a day where you can rise to the challenge of what your life is?
Can you find purpose in being loving to the downtrodden in your own life or community, by being that one?
If it were not for those people who were that one—the one on the phone who heard me cry, the one who hugged me, the one who told me I mattered when I didn't believe it—I would have sliced open my wrists in a tub a long time ago.
Because being that one, in a small way, makes a difference.
You won't know if you did or not, but the chance is always there. To not only find hope, but to give hope.
So be kind. And have courage. Even in very dark places, there is always a light.
Be that one. Be that light.
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