Searching for Hope

For more than 72 million of us, this last week has been hard. For those of us who weren't happy with the outcome of the election, it's felt heavy. It's felt dark. It's felt hopeless. And while I’ve shared that sentiment, I haven’t felt it as deeply as some of my friends and family.

It’s not that I wasn’t angry and depressed with the results, or because I’m naively optimistic. But I do have hope.

Now I didn’t start this blog thirteen years ago to write about politics. But the intersection of how people on the losing side feel and how I’ve often felt in the darker days of my cancer journey is the search for hope. Because if there’s one thing that cancer survivors need if they want to thrive is hope.

It can be an elusive creature, hiding in the shadows of despair. When the world is quiet, late at night, and your mind is flooded with what ifs and you’re searching online for the meaning of some innocuous symptom, it’s hard to find the energy to allow yourself to be hopeful. And when your slow-growing lymphoma becomes a fast growing aggressive one, it’s not easy to have a lot of hope. When you’re looking at a year of recovery post-transplant; when you’re missing your son’s high-school graduation party because you’re in the hospital or your son’s college graduation because it’s not safe enough to travel, it seems futile to even look for hope.

But that’s what you do.

I’ve been sitting here trying to think of how I actually do that. Because when I think back, particularly through these last 24 months or so, I’ve always had hope. And I don’t know if there’s some inherent process or way of thinking that drives me to find hope. Is it innate personality or learned behavior? I am, by my nature, an optimistic person. (I’ve written about that a bit, including this post from way back in 2012 less than six months after my initial diagnosis, and this one just months before my lymphoma got scary in 2022.) But I’ve also learned through this journey that it’s okay to allow yourself to be optimistic; there’s no jinx in saying out loud that you’re hopeful. Your cancer is not going to come back just because you hope it doesn’t. You’re not predicting the future. You’re just hoping for a better one.

So when those times come - and they do come — when despite my nature, the dark clouds seem to obscure that beacon of hope, I’ve learned that it is always there.