2. Refusing despair
Back in my activist days I was so high on hope I thought I’d never have to come down. I believed we were saving the world. I actually used those words. I remember saying them sheepishly, with an apologetic shrug, as if I understood how overblown my ambition was, but I was only posturing. I didn’t feel humble at all. I knew we were saving the world. I knew it. I worked for salvation and for that alone. It was all I wanted to do because what could be more important?
So the people in my life came second. I’m not proud of that, but hope was my primary relationship. Real people couldn’t begin to compete. Please, though, don’t think I was one of those guys afraid to commit. I was a commitment maniac. It’s just that I gave my best to hope, leaving scraps for friends. As for romancing a sweetheart, no time for that. Besides, that would have been cheating.
Instead of making a home for myself, I worked on fixing the world. I once went twelve years without taking a whole week of vacation at one time. I felt noble doing that. It gave me a rush. And it was such a mistake. I would have done much better work if I had taken care of myself, but I didn’t because getting high on hope felt so much better.
I depended on hope. It got me through very long, very hard days. I could never have driven myself like I did without it. Whatever work seemed most urgent in the moment, that’s what I threw myself into: ending the war in Vietnam, marching for civil rights, saving wetlands, stopping rape.
What I loved best, though, and what I did longest, was teaching children how to get away from kidnappers and molesters and how to get help if they were being abused at home. It was self-defense plus self-esteem. The kids got to see themselves differently. Yes, they could be overpowered by dangerous adults but that did not mean they were helpless. I interviewed molesters in prison who told me that when they went out hunting, they looked for a lonely child who was starved for attention, and, most importantly, a child who was submissive. Why? Because even a little kid can be a force to reckon with. Have you ever tried to put a three-year-old to bed who’s determined not to go?
A perpetrator can’t afford to grab a child who has moxie enough to kick him in the shins, do her special safety yell, break free, and run, run, run for help. Just because you don’t have as much power as someone else, does not mean you don’t have power. Or that when you’re in terrible danger, you can’t fight back with everything you’ve got.
But what’s the connection between children and saving the world? I simply believed that if kids grew up okay, they would in turn make the world okay. That’s how I thought salvation would arrive, in two giant steps.
The first sign of trouble came at night. Sometimes I’d wake up in the dark and find that hope, my soulmate, was gone, leaving me to stare into the abyss. I know that’s a cliché, but that’s how I experienced it, and it didn’t feel any less upsetting for being a cliché.
Eventually dawn would come and I’d jump out of bed anxious to throw myself into the day because hope would be back, taking me by the hand and rushing me forward, keeping me so busy there wasn’t time to stop and think about what had happened in the night.
What was it exactly that killed hope for me? Was it all the scary facts about the state of the world and the damning predictions by thoughtful people? That figured in. But what really shook me to my core were the personal battles between activists, people with such good hearts who vilified each other and hurt each other so badly.
I was in my share of those battles. I hated them, but I was in them. I remember the apocalyptic urgency. We, on our side, considered ourselves righteous while we demonized our supposed enemies, which they did back to us in turn. We all said we were working to make a compassionate world, but we could be so hard on each other, turning our precious work, and ourselves, bitter. Over time, that bitterness is what hurt me. Burnout, the dreaded occupational hazard of the activist, was nothing to me. I burned out many times and bounced back. But the people stuff broke my heart.
My downward spiral continued. I would routinely leave the office at nine-thirty at night, buy a dead cellophane sandwich at the gas station behind our building, and eat it while driving home. Once there, I’d sit down on the edge of my bed, sink into my exhaustion, and look at the troubled night ahead. If I was lucky, tears would come. But I never knew what to do with them.
The final phase began when hope started disappearing during the day, only for an hour or two, but that was not a good sign. Gradually it got worse. Hope would be gone all day and all night. Sometimes it wouldn’t show up for weeks at a time. And then, finally, it didn’t come home at all.
So it was over between me and hope. I knew it, but I couldn’t accept it. And then I had my bright idea: I would resurrect hope like forcing blooms in winter. How would I do that exactly? By studying evolution. Does that sound strange? Well, I’m an odd one. I decided that evolution was willfully hiding the secret I needed.
For years I’d read self-help books by the dozen, trying to understand what makes people tick. In my twenties, I was so socially inept that I was desperate for every bit of help I could get. But now I decided that down under all that psychology fluff was a hard core of biology. I would dig there and find the critical clue and breathe life back into hope. And what if I was the one who found the answer? The answer of answers that would take away the pain of the world. What if I was the one who figured out how to make hope live forever? Talk about apotheosis.
So again I worked, obsessed now with getting to the bottom of the human operating system. I struggled through books I had to read twice just to get traction. Looked at from the outside this was an academic grind, but experienced from the inside it was a perverse journey because I had come looking for hope in exactly the wrong place.
Late one Saturday afternoon, dozing over my reading in my easy chair, I started nap-dreaming. I saw myself holding a sad blue candle of inquiry before me as I descended into the deep cave of human nature, plodding doggedly down and down, turn after turn, until far underground I came upon her, the Keeper of the Secret, seated on her weathered wooden throne. I stopped in front of her, ready to demand an answer. But she knew what I had come for and before I could speak, she leaned forward, whispered in my ear as if to comfort me, “You are made wrong,” enveloped my candle with her huge hand and crushed it out. Then in the darkness she put her lips to my forehead and gave me the kiss of death.
My hard work had backfired. I had only managed to kill the hope I was trying to save. I ended up convincing myself again—this time with scientific authority—that there will be no salvation for us.
I know what it’s like to drop down through the ninety-nine stations of hope from one hundred percent all the way down to one percent. But that long, slow, ratcheting descent is nothing compared to the sudden shock of losing the last little bit of hope, because if you have even one infinitesimal shred left, that means hope still might live. Hitting absolute zero, though, that final extinction, was a crossing over.
I had been scared that if hope died, I’d turn into a despair zombie, hollowed out inside, just going through the motions day after day, doing nothing better than watching my soul die. But wrong again.
Here I was, caught between the impossible and the unacceptable. I couldn’t go back to hope. It was dead and there was nothing to be done about that. Yet I couldn’t let despair take me. I just couldn’t. Life is supposed to be binary—hope or hopelessness, one or the other, take your pick. But when hope was utterly gone, when I had nothing left to lose, a new story started, a third way emerged, and the death of hope turned into a generative death.
How did this happen? I can’t tell you because the sense of fight that showed up in me came on its own. I don’t feel like I had a hand in it. Something in me rooted and muscular, something all elbows and urgency, simply refused to surrender.
I remember the last time I saw a two-year-old discovering “no.” Her determined pout and tough-guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self-delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self-affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says, “Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”
