Blog Series Guest Post: "Hope?"

Author: Leslie Kassal

Bio: ...I remember being about 4 or 5 and feeling as if something was different, wrong, "too private"....as if I was not healthy, but growing inward, and disturbed.  In retrospect, I was carrying more sadness than any child should have borne.

Now, I am 65, and more whole than I have ever been.  I am grateful for expert psychiatrists, medicine, hospitalizations, and friends like Megan Roach, that I have met along the way.......

"Hope?"

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope." Barbara Kingsolver

When my Facebook friend, Megan, asked if I would be willing to share some words about mental illness, I decided that would be fine.

I thought that the subject of Hope and its role in recovery would be a rather easy thing for me to describe and share.  But it has not been as easy as I had wished.

For, while I know that Hope is essential to all of life, and that recovery would be very challenged without having Hope, when I looked more closely at my life, I needed to be far more honest.

Hope does not come easily for me.  I often feel as if I am on a jungle gym, and hanging on for dear life, just to get to the next bar of metal.

Will I fall, will I hurt myself?  Will I be able to enter the 'playground' at all?

What I know about myself is that I often feel as if I literally cannot go on one minute more.  My Inner Hopelessness is real, and pervasive, and I try to hide how unnerving it feels.

Somehow, some way, I have entered a rhythm in my life which works.  I know that I can call my psychiatrist, leave a message; I can use prn meds; I can write (which brings me great succor and relief); I can go to sleep; I can use food to anesthetize me.

What I cannot do is give up.....................

So there you have it: my imperfect, idiosyncratic take on Hope.  I am still alive, which is something I never take for granted.