Despair is a worthless emotion.
What I write now, I write as much to myself as anyone. It’s a mantra I repeat in my head, hoping it will persuade my heart. I am predisposed to despair. I have major depressive disorder and panic disorder. That’s been worse lately, and I have little doubt the coming years will make it worse still.
To write this at all makes me feel like the worst among hypocrites. I am a terrible practitioner of most of what I’m about to say. Yesterday began with a pair of panic attacks and ended with me sobbing in the shower. I am a very poor person for anyone to invest their hopes in. But I have to say it. Not only on the off chance it’ll be helpful to someone else, but because I need to make it real for myself.
Despair is a worthless emotion.
That’s something that is self-evidently true, and yet damn near impossible to force my heart to respond to. Despair has never convinced anyone to put in the work. It’s never made anyone sharper, more driven. It’s never lifted anyone up. It’s never delivered the faintest sliver of help to someone else. It’s the mind-killer, the final and lowest condition; we are not meant to experience it, certainly not at length.
Hope, that’s a motivator. Negative emotions can be, too — fear, anger. Despair is the absence of all three. It’s nothing.
The problem is that hope is often irrational. Or it seems that way. The truth is that humanity has come back from far lower points than this. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. On some level, history supports that.
But hope is such a personal thing. The universe eventually gets there, but a lot of people are gone by the time it does. I think what we’re all collectively grappling with right now is the realization that it may well have fallen to us to be the ones fighting for that sunrise that we’ll never see — giving our blood, sweat, and tears for those who have yet to be born. It’s hard to find hope in the idea that the war will be won when so many of us won’t survive the battle.
Increasingly, I think hope isn’t something you have. It’s something you choose. You choose it not because it’s rational but because what else is there? The alternative is despair, and despair, as previously stated, is useless. You choose it even though you don’t feel it. You believe in it even though it’s intangible. You do it because if you don’t, what’s the point? Why get out of bed in the morning, go to work, come home? How does it benefit us to accept misery?
Hope, I think, isn’t always this warm, fuzzy thing. It has a lot of manifestations. Sometimes it looks a little like stubbornness. Because accepting despair? That’s what they want you to do. They want you to sit down and shut up. They want you to go away. The most vocally brutal and misanthropic presidential campaign in my lifetime just won the White House. They want you angry, they want you broken, they want you hurt, they want you gone. If you stand and fight for no other reason, do it so they don’t win — so they don’t get to look down at your supplicated form and know they’ve defeated you.
Because as long as we are choosing hope, as long as we are finding happiness, as long as we are finding community, as long as we are living our lives to the fullest, they haven’t beaten us, and they know that. Joy is an act of resistance. It’s a chosen thing, a thing that’s sought, pursued, striven for, not a thing that simply happens. It’s love, it’s solidarity, it’s taking care of one another. It’s seizing the day, it’s obstinance, it’s refusing to buckle.
Dark times are ahead. There’s no denying that. What we do, tangibly, I have no idea. Better minds than mine will have to weigh in on what we can do to protect the people the hammer will fall on first. Maybe we need to accept that macro-level change isn’t possible right now — which isn’t to say that we don’t fight, don’t organize, don’t vote, but to say that we need to decouple our sense of wellbeing from our progress as a society. It’s so hard, standing on a field of bodies, to find fulfillment in saving the one person who can still be saved. Lord knows I’m no good at it. But I think we need to. Focusing only on the big picture can be paralyzing. We do what we can, we try to find some measure of peace in it, in the good that’s possible. We work slowly toward the future where hopefully it will be commonplace.
There’s a story my pastor told a long time ago, when I was a child growing up in the church. I think it’s pretty common in that community. It’s insufferably self-helpy, but it’s stuck with me over the years. It tells of a man walking along a beach coated in stranded starfish, drying up in the sun. Along the way, he encounters another man throwing them back into the water. The first man shakes his head and asks the second, “Why bother? There are hundreds of them. It won’t matter.”
The second man picks up another starfish and throws it, too, back into the ocean. Then he looks at the first, and says: “It mattered to that one.”
Hope. Joy. Stubbornness. Everything in between. I think that’s what it looks like. I think that’s what we choose. And I hope — I don’t know, but I hope — that peace and happiness, the kind we feel as well as intellectualize, lay along that path. History suggests that a better tomorrow, eventually, maybe soon, maybe after we’re all long gone, is there, too.
I don’t know how we fix this. I don’t know what steps we take. My predictions for a first Trump term, in 2016, were extremely dire — and the reality still eclipsed every single one. I can’t even begin to predict what round two inflicts on us. This campaign was rooted in the worst kind of racism and xenophobia; millions of dollars were spent on the gut-wrenching dehumanization of trans people. It feels like just about anything could be on the table this time. I suspect difficult choices are ahead of us. I hope I’ll have the courage to make the right ones. I hope we all will.
But what we can do, in the meantime, is choose hope, in whatever form it’s accessible to us. Seek out like minds. Cling like hell to them, because we’re going to need each other so very desperately. Find someone who needs help and help them. Forget about the numbers, focus on the individual — because what you do will matter to them. Posting is not activism — and believe me, there is no one I say that to as loudly as myself — so find a way to put your money where your mouth is. Build. Create. Be a shoulder to lean on, and don’t be afraid to lean on others in turn.
Being happy, and making others happy — that’s what resistance looks like now, every bit as much as it looks like bodies in the streets. The road isn’t easy, but it’s the only road there is. Maybe you think a better world isn’t possible. Sometimes — a lot of times — I think that. But the only way to know it for sure would be to stop fighting. As the sage once said: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”
As long as I’m able, I’m going to try my best to choose livin’.
Matthew Triponey 