Hope is a difficult word for me. Not because I don’t have hope in the future, but because I daydream about too many hopes that will never come to pass. An overflow of hope, if you will.
Many of you reading along already know that I have a brother who died by suicide when I was 17 (he was 20), but many of you may not know this. It’s been close to 10 years now, so I am confident in telling you that I have mourned the person my brother was. Until the past month, I must confess that I don’t know if I had ever thought about the need to mourn the person I hoped my brother would become. I’ve never mourned the relationship that I thought we would one day have, but I need to.
If you’ve ever worked in food services, you know that you have to rotate the foods that last long (butter, creamer, soda, etc.) to make sure that on one crazy-busy day you don’t accidentally give someone a creamer that has been expired by sitting in the back of the fridge for months and makes their coffee chunky. I think the same must be true for dreams and hopes. I have hopes that I’ve been holding onto so tightly that I have forgotten that they have expired. I have dreams that I have wanted for so long that I believe they’ll come true without me even working toward them. This isn’t pessimism speaking, it’s healthy thought process.
There are some hopes that we hold that will never come to pass. I will never know who my brother would have become, or what relationship we would have had with one another. I will never become a professional dancer–my injured and diseased body would never allow that. There are some dreams that need to be rotated to the front before they do get expired. If I don’t start taking action on pursuing the dream of playing guitar in a more-than-a-beginner kind of way, then I’ll lose what I do know and I’m not sure if I’d ever start over, knowing myself (be honest, you’ve got a few of those too).
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I’ve figured out how to let go of those expired hopes, or try to pretend I’m an expert that can teach you how to let go of yours. They tell you to write what you know for a reason, and I don’t know that. But, I will ask you the same questions that I’m asking myself. I will encourage you to seek a guide if you think it will be helpful to you, and I will challenge you to look to the back of your refrigerator to see what might be moldy or frozen in time back there.
So here’s what I do know:
-You are worth more than the moldy, expired hopes in the back of your fridge.
-You are capable of more than you can even imagine right now, so rotate those dreams and maybe toss a few out if they don’t taste quite right.
-Less is more. Less “hopes” to hold gives you a tighter grip. It also gives you room to discover new ones without feeling guilty that you haven’t done the other ones as you get older.
-Guides are really helpful, even when it isn’t obvious. (read: guides = therapists. It’s a more helpful explanation of what they do anyway.)
-Writing letters (that you never send) to the people involved in those expired hopes is painfully and beautifully revealing. Painful like digging out an infected sliver-necessary, but beautifully revealing like Seattle after it rained this summer, clearing out the smoke in the sky from the fires in Vancouver.
No challenge this time except to open your refrigerator door and take a peek. Thanks for letting me share some of my moldy cheese with you.
Until next time,
Sarah
Life Unbalanced 