Choosing To Hope

***Disclaimer, I cannot speak to everyone's trauma and triggers, each one is so complicated and I am not a professional. This is what I’m learning from mine, and maybe it can help you with yours.***

It is never as dark as your eyes can make it seem.

I realized it feels so dark because it’s been so light, and what happens with your eyes if they don’t have any time to adjust? If the light suddenly becomes pitch black or if it’s pitch black and you turn the light on, it’s always jarring. It’s always darker than it really is right away, or brighter than it really is right away before it balances out and your eyes adjust. 

I was triggered in a very unexpected way and that is how I felt, like the lights just went out. 

I was laying in my bed, trying to sleep but I couldn’t because I was going through the motions of a trauma spiral. And from somewhere in me, I heard, “It is never as dark as your eyes can make it seem.”

I repeated it to myself over and over. 

“Give it time, you’ll be able to see soon.”

I fell asleep, I don’t remember any dreams but I woke up feeling like I had just been in battle. 

Emotionally and mentally I had been.

So I did the best thing I knew to do, the thing that always gets me to a place of balance, ask questions and sit in the tension.

I was so angry at hope, hurt by it. I wanted to kill any hope I had in me, I wanted to make it impossible to hope again. I wanted to throw in the towel and run back to bitterness.

Hope has been such a good friend to me recently, and this trigger made me run from it. I sat there, as I was giving in to hopelessness, and asked myself, why? Why do I feel like hope is gone now? Why do I feel stupid for hoping? Why am I going there?

And it clicked, I was just trying to find a way out. A way out of feeling how painful it can be to believe when I see something that challenges that belief. And I feel the delay of that belief, the delay of that hope, the delay of that dream. And suddenly that feeling of the rug being pulled out from underneath me is back. 

So I wrote this:

I’m just trying to find a way out

A way that’s less painful than believing

But I trust in hope a little too much now

That even if it’s deferred

And my heart becomes sick

I know that it is just for a moment

I know that hope is leading me to life

As I carry the promise of longing

Through the many deaths along the way

I realized that the rug wasn’t being pulled out from underneath me, it was just lifted because things are hiding underneath that I need to address first. 

I saw the purpose in it all, the purpose in that trigger. That triggers are an invitation for love and your way to healing. Though it can, it’s not something to derail you, but it’s something that actually gets you there.

The place that was triggered in me, I was not thankful for it at first, but I am now. Because I realized it was revealing a place in me that I didn’t know needed attention, a place that I didn’t know needed love and healing. 

It was showing a shadowy part in me that is poison to hope, and poison to my dreams.

That shadowy part is a safe place that I run to, to hide from hope. And if I’m going to continue walking this path of hope, I have to let it die. And to carry the promise of longing, I have to stop escaping and trust that hope is going to lead me to what’s actually meant for me. 

As I carry the promise of longing through the many deaths along the way - Holding onto hope and walking with hope is accepting being triggered and letting certain things come to an end or transform into a new, healthier version.

It is not easy. Hope is not cruel, it sees what we cannot, believes when we cannot, and holds the promise when we cannot.

I still choose to hope in what I cannot see, to hope in what’s only with me in spirit, and to hope in love even when it looks different.

With love,

Sarah.