The Sliver That Saves You

On hope, heartbreak, and a tiny maybe

A while back, I found myself in a kind of darkness I hadn't felt in a very long time. It wasn’t the productive kind of hard, it wasn’t the grit-your-teeth-and-get-through-it kind. It was the kind where you wonder what the point of any of it is. 

What struck me as strange was that in my life, I have have gotten through, out, over, and to the other side many times. Trauma. Violence. At sixteen, a lawyer asked for my diary for evidence. Cancer at twenty-eight, the clearing of which came with the cheerful little footnote that getting pregnant might bring it back. My 8-week old baby in a coma. None of those things had broken me in the way I was feeling then. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening now. What was different? 

I held onto that question for a while. After meeting with a client one day, I found myself crying, and really mulling things over. And then it hit me. 

When I was told that trying for a baby might be dangerous and bring the cancer back, for example, I still had a maybe. There was a chance it wouldn't come back, and so I held onto that maybe with both hands and I leaped. That wasn't recklessness; it was hope doing its quiet, stubborn work. Looking back, there were so many other times when hope was my lifeline. My young life, my adolescence, my life as a parent, new and old, so many times I have powered through, sometimes almost blindly, on hope alone. 

And then I thought about the times that felt like they broke me. Watching my mom be taken apart piece by piece by a disease that had no mercy and no cure was one time that I felt very broken. I couldn’t sit quietly without sobbing, I couldn’t listen to music, couldn’t meditate. When I looked inward I found nothing but a very broken heart. There was no maybe anywhere to be found, and there was nothing I could do to stop or even ease her suffering. There was nowhere for hope to live and that is why it broke me in a way that other things hadn’t. 

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." — Nietzsche

I have always loved that quote, but it hit me differently recently, I think because I’ve never given the really broken times much thought, to ponder why I’m there and why it feels different.  

Hope is often the only thing that gives you a why. And without a why, even the smallest how becomes unbearable. 

Here's what I've learned: when things feel hopeless, the move isn't to conjure some grand, sweeping optimism. There’s hardly a way to conjure much of anything in those times. Instead, I reach for something smaller, something that I can grasp with one tiny pinch of my fingers because that's all I feel I have - I look for one tiny sliver of hope. I try to find one corner of the situation where a maybe still exists. Just one. And I focus there as long as I can.

Sometimes that sliver is embarrassingly small. Maybe it’s just to determine one thing about tomorrow, or next week, or next month, that could be different in a good way from today. That's enough to go to sleep with a slightly renewed and hopeful heart. It doesn't have to fix everything and it doesn’t have to be certain; it just has to give you enough of a why to keep going a little longer.

Hope doesn't need to be big to carry you; it just needs to exist. 

Until next month; keep looking for the sliver.