Nobody Gets to Change You

We'll get back to hockey next week, but first I wanted to talk about combatting hopelessness in a country of trolls.

I went back to therapy in April 2020, as one with decent healthcare does at the start of a modern pandemic. I was overwhelmed with an emotion I couldn’t identify, and I knew that was dangerous. “Name it to tame it,” is a phrase all of the therapy teacher’s pets among us know well.

I sat there in front of my stupid laptop, on the stupid teletherapy call, feeling like a child on the verge of a tearful tantrum. Could she even see my eyes welling up behind my Zoom “touch up” filter?

I said something like: “I hate not knowing if things will ever get better – or when they might. No one can know, I can’t trust anyone telling me it will – not that anyone is really telling me it will. Maybe it’s that distrust – it looks like this will last a lot longer than those two weeks. I’m questioning things I never even knew were on the table for questioning. It’s disorientation, it’s lack of trust, it’s…” 

She let me finish, but I had nothing else. After sitting in silence for a bit, she asked: “Do you think you’re hopeless? I mean, do you think you feel hopeless?”

She was right, and the simplicity of the truth made me laugh for the first time in a long time. I was, indeed, existentially hopeless. 

Hopelessness is so distinct, so overbearing, but so hard for a reckless optimist to process. The last time I’d felt that way was the 2016 election, because that was the last time the people I looked to for guidance and direction – the big kids, the adults in the room, those I perceive as the experts – got it wrong. Worse still, they didn’t seem to have a clear path forward to eventually getting it right.