Hopelessness

Hopelessness is one of those tricky emotions, like shame, where the unpleasantness of feeling it is amplified by the fact that I don’t want anyone to know that I’m feeling it. Not only do I experience hopelessness as a kind of emotional prison in which my world seems devoid of any avenues for finding joy or meaning, but shame tells me it’s my own fault for being hopeless, like it’s a choice. And to make matters worse, shame says if I tell anyone when I’m feeling hopeless it will somehow make it more true! Which makes it especially difficult to escape from said emotional prison when I can’t even ask a friend to smuggle in a metaphorical chisel hidden in a birthday cake.

Whether I like it or not, hopelessness has been showing up a lot for me throughout the pandemic, and I know I’m not the only one (it’s worth noting that I recorded this episode in January, before Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, but it feels even more fitting now). I notice that my hopelessness is also often paired with another emotion I don’t want anyone to know I’ve been feeling, which is helplessness. I have an old expectation that I need to always be hopeful, optimistic, purpose-driven, and capable of pulling myself up by my own bootstraps, so when that expectation is thwarted, not only is it inherently unpleasant, but shame swoops in and says, “Hey, you shouldn’t be feeling this! This isn’t the kind of person you are!” The addition of shame to these already demoralizing feelings adds yet another sensation into the mix, patheticness. It makes for quite a trio, feeling hopeless, helpless, and pathetic.

As I began exploring and talking about these hopeless feelings though, I realized that I was conflating the feeling of hopelessness with the belief that things actually are hopeless. In Affect Theory, an emotion is seen as a combination of a physical sensation and the cognitive stories we tell ourselves about what that sensation means. As a child, whenever I felt this specific unpleasant sensation, I must have looked around at the circumstances and the world and came to the conclusion that that feeling meant there was no hope. And as I grew up, that explanation got wired into my brain, so every time that feeling came up, it automatically triggered the thought: things must be hopeless! And I just believed it.

Perhaps the most startling demonstration of this effect came in January when I was talking about hopelessness in a Curios‘ book club. At that time, coming off the high of the holidays and new year, I was actually feeling quite hopeful and optimistic. But as I talked about the hopelessness I’d experienced the year prior and imagined the feeling, something unexpected happened. I felt a sudden hit of the emotion in my body, just briefly. But what was so surprising, was that for the few seconds I was in that feeling, I truly believed that things were hopeless again! And then as soon as the feeling passed, I went right back to thinking things were hopeful. It was shocking and humbling to see how quickly and easily my own sense of “reality” could be hijacked by an emotion! I actually jumped in and out of the emotion a couple of times with the same polarizing effect. This experience was highly instructive!

Now, when hopelessness arises, I try to remind myself that it’s really just a feeling, not a belief. My hopelessness has no bearing on the actual potential for joy and meaning out there in reality. Just like how I deal with shame, I can accept and feel the hopelessness, allowing it to pass naturally without believing that it’s true, without identifying it as what I really think, and without acting on it (or not acting because of it, as the case may be).

James Glick's beautiful book about time travel

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