A moment with hope.

Around this time last year, I wrote about hope. I was angry and hurt. Life was just dark and dreary. The days endless and the nights evolving into scenes of helplessness. I was exsiting only because I had to. Because of responsibility and need. I existed. But I didn’t live. I couldn’t laugh. Anger simmered within every part of me. And hope, that elusive light of possibility. It seemed to be a cruel, unfair privilege that I had no use for. I didn’t want to hope. Because at that time, everything was dark. I couldn’t see a way out. There was no light. Just the daily grind filled with a sense of overwhelming helplessness that weighed down my existence. I worked, took care of my kids and fell asleep with an unsettling feeling of wishing tomorrow would never come.

I found the little notebook today. With my morose thoughts and existential questions of years past. It scared me because while time has passed, many of those same thoughts feelings live within me. Unchanged. The emotions I had then still exist today. Some deeper, stronger and more settled. Some thinned out. On their way out, but clinging. Evidence of a depression never resolved. Constant moments of pain and sadness that I never allowed to leave.

Where the darkness of last year extinguished hope. This year, its there. A flickering light. Barely there. Unseeable, but with a chance to become more. It’s there. For the first time in a long time; the future feels possible. Hope feels acceptable. Not yet comfortable. But there, making its precense know. Playing into my thoughts and evolving my beliefs.

So much has happened to me this last decade. I lost myself. I let my power go. I gave control to someone else and in the process became a ghost in my own body and mind. I allowed time to pass without feeling. Numbness, sadness, hopelessness became my constant companions.

It didn’t happen over night. It was insidious. Slowly the voice in my head became his. The confidence and belief I had in myself slipped away. Little by little. In the night. As I slept. A little bit of me would disappear and leave in its place a morose robot going through the motions.

But one day, it finally happened. We ended. He walked away. I was on my own. Left with the robot and shattered pieces of me all around. It took me a long time to decide to wake up. To unfurl my soul from its decade long slumber. And when I did…..when I did. A small bit of light came back.

I started clearing my house today. Taking the things that represented us out and adding me back into the space. I bought a painting that I loved. Painted an old chair. And started making plans for the changes ahead. And that’s when I found my old battered notebook. Reading through the pages; my thoughts lost in the sadness of yesterday. My heart hurting because that sadness never left. I realized, that something changed. And as I cleaned, and packed, nailed in, and threw away; I got it. Every move. Every change. Every new thought of the possibilities ahead meant hope. I felt it.

I still don’t trust it. And my thoughts and emotions shy away from it. Even as I write. But it’s there. I can’t seem to control it. So as I slowly re-build. As I focus on destroying the negativity that has rooted. As I change; I know hope will grow. It will burn and consume those charred and ashy pieces of me that have cut through the joy. It will lighten the gray. I know it will. Because, the battle for it to even exist within me was long and scarring. But the seed was planted and now I’m just waiting for the roots to grow.