Finding something to fight for when you feel there isn’t anything.
Hello everyone, welcome back for another week at the most cheerful blog on the internet. I know I’ve written recently about hope – please read it here – but I wanted to further explore the topic, particular for those who have none or it seems have given up hope (for whatever reason).
Perhaps “fight” isn’t the right verb, but maybe it is. A verb, a “doing word”, a call to action, to engage with life. When you have no hope, you have no desire to endure...no fight in you.
I could write a summary of why people could be lost or given up hope, but I’m not here to tell you what to despair over or why you’ve given up. I am here to tell you I understand and have empathy for what you’re going through. I feel there are many silent cries for help (and some not so silent) going on right now, and not a lot of genuine care for these people in need.
Sometimes a lack of hope can be a problem of perception, and all that is needed is some cognitive reframing exercises to correct the distortions in our thinking. Some of the common ones are:
- All-or-none thinking i.e. “I always stuff things up”
- Fortune telling i.e. “I am going to stuff things up”
- Catastrophising i.e. “It is going to be the worst thing ever”
- Personalisation i.e. “It will be all my fault”
- Labelling i.e. “I am a bad person”
“We cannot change anything until we accept it.” – Carl Jung
As is with our mental health, we can choose to confront and deal with our problems or we can choose to avoid and deflect them. Much like pain, we can choose to feel it or numb it. It’s very appealing to give in – some might not realise the strength within them they have – especially if one is already feeling hopeless, it can compound to produce new levels of despair. We’re humans, not machines. We all have our limits, we don’t have an on and off switch, and our emotions deeply effect our ability to function.
Learning how to be with yourself in silence (or nature) is of big help to our sanity and outlook. Your thoughts, feelings and desires, in essence “YOU”, will arise far more readily as a result and then you can go about taking care of them. Your body and mind will communicate things to you, but modern people have become overstimulated to the point where this is largely getting drowned out – a lot of the time by choice as people seek to avoid and deflect as previously mentioned.
So, practically, some of the things you can do is dial back your stimuli. Humans seem to have this incessant need to always be doing something, we’re “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as T.S. Eliot would say. Narrow your focus, come back to concentrating on you and your outlook as opposed to the wider world and all its woes. Control what you can control is a great stoic principle to help with this. This isn’t about being passive or ignorant or narcissistic, but aiming at increasing hope (or decreasing dread at least).
Another thing you can do is reduce your friendship circle. The right people around you quite literally acts as your “circle of life” – they rejuvenate you. As sad as it might be to admit this, most people probably won’t end up being that helpful to you. I know there are a lot of people out there who don’t have friends, family or intimate partner and thus their loneliness and lack of support compounds their feelings of hopelessness. “No one wants to be around me”, “no one loves me”, “I’m a burden”, are some of the mantras people might tell themselves as a result of being in this situation, and for many different reasons.
You have to know yourself to know who you want to have around you. You have to have the belief that you are worthy of love, in spite of your flaws. You have to summon the courage to (continue to) reach out to people until you’ve found enough good ones to stabilise, support and enrich your life. You have to learn to be ruthless and cut people out who are no longer helpful to your wellbeing. You have to be prepared to ask yourself honestly whether the problems lie within you. You have to map out a vision of a better future.
Speaking of vision, it might be beneficial to scale back your vision, in both time and breadth, to facilitate a bit more hope of controlling something smaller and more immediate. It’s very easy to feel hopeless when we’re grand-scale planning for our futures many years from now or catastrophising worldly problems onto our individual selves which we see as having no control over. It’s time to wind things back a bit, not to get too caught up looking too far forward (or back for that matter), and to once again bring it closer to home and your close surroundings. It’s a bit easier to generate a sense of personal agency and efficacy, something I can manage and carry out, when we make it short(er) term and directly impacting ourselves (this also helps us to celebrate the small wins more readily too). I know many wax lyrical about becoming more present, but this will help if you’re struggling to project hope into your future.
“Sometimes it’s our pride and ego which keeps us going, and sometimes it’s the very thing preventing us from keeping on going.”
We must try and learn the ability to communicate to ourselves, both men and women, in a far more productive, caring and conducive to long-term success manner. We must agree upon shared common goals rather than just wanting our slice of the pie (or even the whole pie ourselves). We must acknowledge that there are some things we cannot fight; We can’t always fight nature, we can’t fight change, we can’t fight gravity. Sometimes we must accept the reality of our lives or situation, and recognise there’s an inherent arbitrary element within the nature of existence.
“I struggled for a long time with survivin'. And you- No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for.” – Joel, The Last of Us
An extremely well written and timed article Martyn, one must always have hope and find it even in the little things in life. I truly relate to this weeks writing and am ever so fortunate to have very special people who surround me with love, care, encouragement and support. Without these special people around me, I feel I would have given up on hope quite some time ago! Love Mum XXX❤️