Letter to Old Friend: Hopelessness.
By Heinrich
Dear friend,
Hope is the most exhausting thing you can learn as a kid. As children, we were taught that as long as you have hope, it’ll all be okay. Hope is the lesson in fables, stories, and even Disney movies.
But as you grow up, hope is sometimes the hardest thing to see. Because with growing up, hopefully, comes the fading of ignorance.
You see the world for what it truly is. A big giant mess full of people who have power and refuse to see that as responsibility. A world full of doubt and fear. Hopelessness.
In our personal lives, our hope for love is infected with every heartbreak. We hope to find a love like our parents’ but as we grow older we see that their love has been hopeless for a long time.
As children, we hope we can reach our dreams because we are told we can. But we live in such a corrupt system that hope can only go so far. Culture and standards work against our dreams.
We hope that things will work out but realize that we are too exhausted to work things out.
But hope is still there. Its relentless nature perseveres. It’s in the back of your head. Lit by a flickering lightbulb. But it’s still there, ever persistent.
Hope is the most exhausting thing you can learn as a kid because you cannot unlearn it. You want to fight it but it’s an undefeated world champion. You are exhausted but you have no other choice but to hope.
So maybe I shouldn’t fight it anymore. Maybe I should embrace hope for all that it is. I should embrace its relentlessness and its perseverance.
I will have hard days. Impossible days. Much like the days I have already experienced. But this time, hope will be my friend. I will stop trying to fight it. I will stop trying to unlearn it.
Because as cliché as it is, life is short. Life is too short to fight the one good thing I learned as a kid.
Sincelerly,
Your friend