In the 37th email this week someone tells me about their goals, their intentions, their projects, their word for the year and for the 37th time this week I roll my eyes and delete the email. I am having a hard time figuring out what to write about today. I had a plan to make a list of my top 10 articles from this year and combine it with what I’ve learned from this consistent writing practice.
But what is coming up is not enthusiasm for writing nor solid or concrete lessons. What I’m feeling is well, how do I say it…? Loss of naivety, loss of hope, embitterment? I’m not sure exactly perhaps “the spark” has died. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” is the inscription above hell before Dante and Virgil in The Divine Comedy. I feel like in some ways I have entered hell. I am driving through a cold and lonely desert. Great, gray, ashy mountains on either side of me. The silence here is deafening. I am coming to this work over and over again and I feel so confused.
Let me explain…
In the past few months here on Substack, some strange things have happened. I’ve started to take my writing (and myself) more seriously. I decided to step into the belief of being a professional because I never really felt professional. And I thought… well, that’s silly. I started writing on Substack as a way to share the heartache and grief of my daughter’s death in 2022. Over time, I’ve stuck with the writing or maybe the writing has stuck in me, I’m not sure but over time our relationship has morphed. I’m no longer sharing poems for friends but sending letters, essays, and ideas about astrology, embodiment, womanhood, etc. to strangers, friends, family, and people opting into paid subscriber tiers.
I don’t really want to write this because it feels really vulnerable to share but I know that means it must be shared. As I have started to take this work more seriously, categorize and contain it with a prayer of artistry, I have done better at reaching a larger audience, and receiving feedback that this is meaningful, I’ve been taken more seriously. My friends, on the other hand, well many of them have unsubscribed. It started happening in October. At first, it didn’t bother me so much but over time it slowly started to bother me. Why were people I knew, who supported me, bowing out of their free subscriptions? Then one friend whom I have always cared for deeply and whom I felt a deep resonance with unsubscribed.
I felt like the air had been knocked out of me but also that my lungs were underwater. It was this strange experience of being trapped inside my body while disassociating from her. It struck me that what I was feeling seemed like an overly emotional response to a “small” trigger. This wasn’t that big of a deal, was it? My body said it was, my mind said it wasn’t. While these two different experiences were happening (losing support from friends but getting traction as a writer) Israel began a genocide. I learned about the Holocene era and how it ended in the 1980s. I learned how we are on track for the sixth great extinction. I feel like the hopeful, cheerful, we can change the world, element of me truly died in the last couple of months.
I have abandoned my hope in change. In people. In life. I feel desolate, like what’s the point? I feel at times like I am talking madness and lunacy to a cave wall somewhere in this desert writing magic symbols on the walls by firelight but in reality, no one else ever cares to see it. The cheerful self feels like she’s been slowly dying for a few years. Holding and grasping for life not willing to give up hope. I have claw marks all over my scalp as evidence of trying to make hope and reality make sense.
But why does the portal to hell say abandon all hope? What even is hope? Liz Gilbert has a Substack now where she shares her (and other’s) two-way prayers called Letters to Love. They all begin the same way: Dear Love, what would you have me know today? I feel like if I tweaked it, writing a letter to hope instead this is what I might hear.
Dear Hope, what would you have me know today?
My dear child. Thank you for coming to speak to me today. I know it has been so hard for you to let go of me. I know that you have held me close as close as your heart beating in your chest. I know that I have always been there for you: in the moments before a gift, in the passing minutes of a task, in the daydreams and visions that have filled your journal pages for years. I have been the one piece of childhood wonder, surprise, and delight that you’ve allowed to stick around.
You said it feels like you’ve lost you’re naïveté. Like you’re staring into reality for the first time, seeing, feeling, truly knowing that death is here. Well, my darling, you have lost it all. That is why you are walking through hell because you woke up in the Dark wood of Error yourself. You don’t know how you got here but you’re hoping you’ll find a way out. You’re hoping it won’t be so bad. You’re hoping, you’re not so bad. You’re hoping so you don’t have to be here in hell. You’re hoping it is not true. You’re even hoping as you write this that I’ll say you’re not in hell.
But my love this is true. You are in the belly of the beast. You are moving through these great pains on purpose and so you must do it purposefully. That is why you must abandon me, for now. You need to leave me here because I am a distraction to you. You may feel that losing me is a pain you cannot bear because it means losing everything you dreamed could be. But that dream was only meant to awaken you from sleep.
You lost your naïveté, yes, my darling, yes. This is progress. You’ve lacked experience because you have not been experiencing. Not love, not loss, not truth, not lies, not laughter, not crying, not a single bit of life. I sent you a dream to awaken you but I have so much more in store for you, you just have to stop hoping to experience it and experience now.
Instead of trying to outrun the silence, the not knowing, the loss, the pain, be in it. Don’t let me stand in the way. Turn towards the blistering nerve-fire of life and let it eat your insides. Let the coals inside you be stoked by your experiences. You did not chose the name Ember for no reason. When you burn away all the hope, all the wishing, all the dreaming, you will be left with a life so full you’ll never want to hope for more (or less).
And when you live a life with no hope you’ll feel so clear, you will be full. No wanting, no desiring, no worrying, no fidgeting. Just you and God. And I know that is who you’ve been seeking and we have been hiding but that is so much fun. To hide and seek, so let it be fun. Let yourself laugh by the fire as scribble nonsense on the cave wall. Let it be absurd. This is a comedy afterall ;)
- Hope