Mental Health Blog, Day 7: Hope & Faith (Future)

‘Hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and good things never die.’

Never, ever, ever give up. Hope is just a word when life is already good, it only gains it’s true meaning when life is awful, when we’re facing our worst nightmares and it all feels totally hopeless, then hope becomes your greatest virtue, friend, and strength. How do you find hope when there is none? Faith. Whether it’s through religion, or not, have faith in yourself. Believe in your own abilities, that you can get through this, and that you are strong enough to get through anything. You’ve gotten through so much before which is proof of your inner strength, now get through this to see the brighter days you deserve. You can do it.

One of the big things to lose if you ever find yourself fighting through a depression is hope. Love and hope are the best things to have, and the worst things to lose. I think if you can get these two back, you are over half-way with defeating depression. They take practice to relearn. If things are really bad right now, you have to have an element of faith to actually believe this, but having faith can save your life. Hold on to it.

‘You can’t change things outside of your control, but you can change your attitude.’ ‘You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.’ By believing in ourselves, and our ability to deal with life’s inevitable hardships, we gain faith in ourselves and hope in our destiny.

Buddhism’s first noble truth = Life is difficult. It’s not what anyone actually wants to hear but accepting this can paradoxically make life a little easier… Know that you will at times struggle, and believe that you will get through it. First world millennial life can be easy in many ways, initially, but in a sense, it doesn’t prepare us for the hardships to come. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us will have faced some of these serious hardships, and all of us will eventually face them. Sometimes, the only way to learn is to get through them and out the other side, by trial and error.

Life is supposed to be difficult, we came from non-living matter, to being alive, and that has been a struggle for every living thing ever since, that struggle is what shapes us through evolution. There is nothing nature throws at us that we are not equipped by nature to handle. In this same way, let pessimism ‘go extinct’, and let your positivity survive and flourish. The struggle is an inherent part of being alive. The secret is, we were built for this, built to survive and grow.

Have hope for a bright future, in order to build it, you will have to build yourself up to be stronger and wiser with each year. ‘We are only defeated when we accept defeat’. ‘However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there’s life, there’s hope’.

When someone close to you dies, or you get fired, or have to drop out of uni, get ‘dumped’, divorced… It can feel like your whole world is crumbling around you. In a way it is, the old world you were living in is always crumbling away, to make space for a new chapter, that you must invent. To keep going through these crazy, dark times, we need above all things hope, to keep carving a tunnel out and into the light again. Every end is a new beginning.

I know I’ve been quoting a lot but I think Tolkien/Samwise the Brave says it best: “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”

Norway Quest Travel Blog, Day 7:

To get closer to Trolltunga we had to stop by at Odda, a small town by a lake, which wasn’t very touristy so we mainly rested. We found an abandoned industrial building which Amy thought was interesting and cool, had a curry, and I wrote more of this blog by candlelight next to the lake.

I had a tough day with negativity this day, probably because we’d been so busy, and finally had a day where we didn’t do much. Everything was very grey and industrial and I’d worn myself out, so it felt a bit depressing. Conversely, Amy found the desolate, damaged appearance of everything interesting, which just further solidifies my view that beauty and ugliness, and their emotional attachments are simply a human illusion/delusion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as is a 'good day'. Your opinion on something makes it what it is, if you believe life is shit, it will be. Happiness is what you make it.

We were fast approaching Trolltunga and this was becoming quite a worry for me, as to whether I’d make the hike with no training, such an emotional backstory to carry with me, and depressive feelings trying to beat me down. I had to have hope that things would get better again, and that the grief would pass again. In order to move on we often need to feel the pain, in a constructive way, rather than forever avoid dealing with any of it. Amy was incredibly supportive and encouraging with her positive spirit, and I’m so lucky to have her with me.