Tag: hope

Hi. Hello. 

I don’t know how to write this, or what to write. But I want to start again (and again and again and again).

My name is Millie, and I find living very difficult. I am still here because I have been blessed with people throughout my life whose wisdom and love holds me together at the seams. 

I started this page six years ago (I think?) at 15. It began as an instagram page where I shared pictures of notes I left for people to find in public. I moved into some generic and some less generic mental health advocacy to my small but important audience. I tried to be what I thought I should be. I learnt along the way. I’m always learning. I learnt some big words along the way. Definition – big words: words that aren’t necessarily long or complex in form but hold ideas that while intrinsic to our everyday lives often have the potential to pass by our daily consciousness. Some of the big words that have woven their way into my learning in the last few years include those such as capitalism, individualism, genocide. And with so many things in life, it takes learning to unlearn, or better put, to build beyond. 

So lately I’m finding the world pretty tricky to be in, in a new way which for the sake of my survival I’m choosing to see as an exciting way. Wouldn’t it be boring if my struggles stayed the same? I fear I’d never be getting anywhere much at all. I’m struggling because theory has suddenly jumped off the page. What do I mean by this? Well, it’s one thing to know mentally. It’s another to know physically, experientially, and spiritually – that is, in one’s soul. Partly time, partly present circumstance (both personally, nationally and globally), but for whatever reason, it’s all jumped off the page and into my extraconscious with force. I am forced to confront myself and my world, and my relationship to the two. And frankly, I don’t know how to do that. How would anybody?

I am scared and angered to levels I’ve never truly experienced before. There’s a genocide being committed and my government is locking up protesters. I cannot articulate what is held in that sentence for me. It was but a few weeks ago simply a painful fact. It’s more than that now. And that’s the only way I know how to describe it. 

All this to say: I’m lost. 

And bear with me here, I promise I’m pretty sure this is headed somewhere. 

When I was 14 I came up with a saying: When you think you are lost you’re usually being found. There’s a story behind it, one I’ve shared before and I’m sure I’ll share again. This sentence has acted like an anchor for me in the ensuing years, so I’ll choose to trust it now. And in fact, I will go one step beyond, I will choose to trust the experience of being lost itself. By which I mean, of course, that I will:

1. View such an experience as prerequisite to change

2. View change as necessary and nurturing

3. View past iterations of self, logic, thought, opinion, and reality as inherently neutral, welcome, and themselves necessary. That is to say, not fear that the experience of lostness may lead to states that could be deemed bad, wrong, unsane, or even simply embarrassing in the future. 

So here comes the thesis: in crises of perception, Creative Hope may be born and exercised. 

Hope can be defined as ‘desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, no date). I would say it’s generally seen as a positive though rather intangible emotion, one that some people, the optimists, seem to have more of than others. I personally know it as one of the first to disappear in depression. This aspect of my relationship with hope led me to examine the idea of hope in my recent state, which I would certainly call a crisis of perception. A crisis of the way things seem to be. A significant departure from my regular internal experience, that has in turn affected my external one. 

So I have thought about hope. And I’ve been distressed. And when I’m distressed, I’m often not too far away from being in the realm of ‘depressed’. Where I don’t find hope. Yet, hope hasn’t disappeared recently. Nor has it been offered up to me from the depths of my mind on a silver platter. In the above definition of hope we see there is a component of desire. I have been confronted by the stark reality that I do not know what it is that I desire. A fact which makes the already elusive ‘hope’ appear transparent (re: crises of perception). 

If I do not know what it is that I desire, how can I possibly expect it will be fulfilled, and therefore meet the criteria for hope? Yes, in general I would say I hope for better. But how often my mind warps better when it lands in front of me because I do not recognise its shape. My gratitude has taught me to love, but my love compels me to hope. And my hope… doesn’t know what to do any more. 

Enter: Creative Hope, which I define as: the active experience of imagining beyond what we know to be possible, into what could be possible; fuelled by love; encompassing action. 

What the hell do I mean by that? Well if hope requires a vision to desire, then it got me thinking how often the visions I have are rooted in what I already know to be true. And how often I am fighting, viscerally, on a daily basis against what I already know to be true, even when I am not conscious that that fight is what I am experiencing. And how whenever I am a little angry, or scared, or sad, my visions shrink smaller and smaller and don’t include very much good at all. And how hope is this elusive thing that I can’t always find. And basically, how to circumvent all of that. 

So Creative Hope is hope, with imagination. With a choice. With action in toe. I choose to imagine a future I may not know exists yet. And then, or simultaneously, because whoever said time had to be linear, I walk a path I think might lead there. 

Remember that whole bit on being lost? Yeah, here’s where it comes back in. Because I’m still not able to see the imagined future very clearly. I came up with the idea of Creative Hope, which I think is an act of creative hope in itself, but I’m figuring out that next bit. If it’s like any of my other experiences, it’ll change constantly anyway. The point is, I trust being lost, which means (as we covered above) that I am not stopping because I am lost. In the non-linearity of Creative Hope I am walking the path that may exist before I even imagine that I can know. And that may seem like a mental loop, I get it, I do, but I promise you it’s better than most of the ones I’ve got available in my brain. 

So, here is my first act of Creative Hope. I’m writing again, I’m running on instinct, I’m stating the thesis at the start of the research. Welcome to my research on living in this world. 

My mum has always told me ‘well, you’re a writer’. Whenever I’m low, stuck, can’t see a future (ie. absent of hope) she says to me ‘well, you’re a writer’. So I’m writing. It feels like it might be the ‘right’ thing to do. And by god, do I want to do something. 

In conclusion: my personal experience of late has led me to reconsider hope in such a way that has led me back to this page, where I am sharing such musings. Words that circle in my head to possibly be explored in the future are madness, community, AI, education, society. f you’ve known this as a mental health space until now, please know that I still see everything I do as mental health advocacy, mainly because I’m mentally ill. I don’t think I’ll ever not be mentally ill by the current standards, and that’s ok with me. It is my only lens and it has shaped every part of who I am and how I see the world. This is most certainly still a mental health advocacy page, but the definition is expanding to encompass what is at the core of mental health and illness: humans. 

If you’ve stayed until the end, I just want to say thank you. 

I hope to be back soon. 

Love x