Choosing Hope Anyway

Hope used to feel naive to me.

It sounded like ignoring reality, like slapping a motivational quote on a cracked wall and pretending the house was fine. I prided myself on being “realistic”—which secretly meant always expecting the worst so I couldn’t be disappointed.

If I didn’t let myself hope, the fall would hurt less. That was the logic.

Except… I was living like I’d already fallen.

The protective shield of pessimism

There’s a certain safety in assuming things won’t work out:

• If the relationship fails, of course it did.
• If the opportunity disappears, I never really believed in it anyway.
• If I feel lonely or misunderstood, that’s just how it is for me.

Pessimism can feel like emotional insurance. You pay the premium upfront in numbness and low expectations so you never have to experience full heartbreak.

The problem is, you also never get to experience full joy.

You’re watching your own life from the cheap seats, arms crossed, saying, “We’ll see,” even when something good is happening right in front of you.

At some point, I realized my “realism” was just fear dressed in smarter clothes.

The small, stubborn lights

What shifted things wasn’t one big miracle. It was a handful of small, almost unremarkable moments:

• A message from someone saying, “I’ve been there too.”
• A conversation that didn’t end in disaster even after I was honest.
• A day when I expected the familiar heaviness and instead felt… okay. Not great, not transcendent—just okay. And that was new.

Tiny things. Nothing Instagram-worthy. But each one felt like a small candle in a room I was sure would always be dark.

I started collecting them.

Not ignoring the pain, not pretending everything was fine—just allowing myself to notice that good existed alongside the hard things. That life wasn’t only one colour.

Hope, I’m learning, isn’t a guarantee that things will turn out the way I want.

It’s the decision to keep the lights on anyway.

Hope as an act, not a feeling

Most days, I don’t wake up feeling hopeful. I wake up feeling tired, or anxious, or flat. Hope isn’t a mood that descends on me; it’s more like a choice I make in small, ordinary ways.

For me, hope looks like:

• Going to therapy even when I’d rather avoid what might come up
• Reaching out to a friend instead of assuming they’re too busy
• Writing here, in public(ish), when part of me whispers, “No one cares”
• Taking care of this body—sleep, food, movement—even when my brain insists it’s not worth the effort

None of these guarantee anything. They’re just small declarations that say:

“I’m still here. I’m still trying. I’m not giving up on myself today.”

Some days I make those declarations reluctantly, with more eye-roll than enthusiasm. That’s okay. Hope doesn’t need me to be enthusiastic. It just needs me to keep showing up.

When hope hurts

I won’t romanticize this: sometimes hope is painful.

Hoping means admitting you care—about relationships, about healing, about your future. And caring means you can be disappointed. You can be hurt. You can lose things you deeply wanted.

There are seasons where hope feels too heavy to carry. In those times, I’ve borrowed it from other people:

• from writers whose words remind me change is possible
• from friends who still believe in me when I can’t
• from strangers who share their stories of surviving darker nights than mine

Sometimes the most hopeful thing I can do is let someone else hold hope for me for a while.

Choosing hope anyway

If you’re in a place where hopeful quotes make you want to throw your phone across the room, I get it. You don’t have to force yourself into gratitude or optimism.

But maybe there’s space for a quiet kind of hope—one that doesn’t erase the pain, but sits beside it.

Hope that you are not done growing.
Hope that your current chapter is not the whole story.
Hope that there are still people you haven’t met yet who will change your life in good ways.
Hope that you can become someone you’re kinder to.

You don’t have to feel that hope strongly. You don’t have to be convinced. You just have to be willing, even a little, to leave the door cracked open.

For today, I’m choosing to believe that the effort I’m making—to tell the truth, to show up, to listen to the violin in me—matters.

Not because I know exactly where it leads, but because I’d rather live as someone who tried than someone who gave up before the music had a chance.

If you’re still here, still breathing, still reading this: you’re already practicing hope, whether you realize it or not.

Let’s keep choosing it, quietly, together.