Episode 64: An Alternative to Hope (From Emily)
An Alternative to Hope: Or, The Secret Medicine for When the Thing With Feathers Stop Singing
I was inspired to make this video obviously because of John Green’s June 25th video, where he talks about taking a break from making videos because: depression, and he concludes with his familiar assurance that despair is a lie, hopelessness is a lie, that life is meaningful, and your life matters. He says he’s going to spend the month of July reminding himself that Emily Dickinson was right, “that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”
LINKS:
Emily’s Youtube (The source for this episode)
Amelia's response to my response
Read this post on my newsletter here
"A Prayer for the Collective" (google doc)
On the “Metaverse”: Rich White Men Looking to Escape the World They Created
"How We Hope" by Adrienne Martin (excellent book)
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle:
Feel free to drop us a line! See you soon.
feministsurvivalproject2020@gmail.com
Transcript:
[Music] Hello friends!
What you're about to hear is a video I actually made for YouTube several months ago, but someone on Instagram requested that I post it there after the election because they thought it might be helpful and then a bunch of people there actually did find it helpful and so my husband suggested that we post it here on the podcast feed.
So it's only 15 minutes and it's on the nature of hope or how to live without it if you haven't got a hope.
Hope it helps.
Hi, I'm Emily.
I was inspired to make this video by John Green's June 25th video where he talks about taking a break for a month from Vlogbrothers because depression.
But really it's inspired by every video John Green has ever made about depression because he concludes that video with familiar assurances from him that despair is a lie and hopelessness is a lie, that life is meaningful and your life matters.
He says he's going to spend the month of July reminding himself that Emily Dickinson was right when she wrote that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.
There are a lot of people in the comments of that video saying how much they need to hear that, how much it helps to hear that, and if you're one of those people that is fantastic for you.
Hopelessness is a lie and despair is a lie and this video is not for you.
This video is for people who cannot hear the little bird perched in their soul singing the tune without the words.
The people for whom hopelessness and despair, it's not productive for them to think of it as a lie.
This video is for the people you might have in your life who for their sanity to save their lives need to abandon hope because for some of us there comes a time when we hurt so hard that our brains push us off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair and we land badly and when we drag ourselves up we find that the little bird of the Emily Dickinson poem is broken.
I mean maybe the bird's on life support and you can't bring yourself to pull the plug because what the hell kind of damaged person can go on without a working hope in their brain or in their soul.
It happened to me in the early 2000s my hope broke the song stopped and I'm willing to believe that it's not permanent but it has been 20 years and in that time I've managed to finish two advanced degrees and write three New York Times best-selling self-help books without it.
So I think I have a viable alternative to offer.
If you like me find yourself in need of this desperate measure of replacing hope because it's like your hope broke.
I want to preface this by saying that nothing I say can take the place of medical care including therapy and if it's right for you medication.
I've been medicated, I've been medicated the whole time and it has definitely helped to keep me alive.
But to explain my alternative to hope first I have to explain what hope means to me.
I follow moral philosopher and author of How We Hope Adrienne Martin who developed an incorporation model that formulates hope as a desire for an outcome and the belief that that outcome is possible but not certain and you use your assessment of the possibility of this desired future as a justification for your feelings, thoughts and plans.
Got that?
Hope is justifying your feelings, thoughts and plans based on your assessment that a desired outcome is possible but not certain.
Martin's point of view derives from her work in phase one trials for cancer drugs.
Phase one medical trials aren't about proving a drug is effective, they're just about proving that a drug isn't dangerous.
Cancer patients for whom no other treatment has been effective may participate in phase one trials not because they have any reason to believe that a drug would treat their cancer, it would be a wild coincidence, one in a thousand if it were effective.
Instead they participate because they want to be part of the scientific process that makes better drugs available to people in the future but some participants had hope for treatment.
"Sure it's one in a thousand but maybe I'm the one," they might think whereas other people basically had the same information the other way around.
"Okay sure it might help but it's one in a thousand."
In this way of thinking about hope the thing with feathers sings its song as long as it can justify its singing with its assessment of the probability of the desired outcome.
For some people one in a thousand is plenty of reason to keep singing.
The reason hope matters by this definition is that a lot of people would use their assessment that something is unlikely as a justification to do nothing at all.
You see no hope, no action and that's why most people cling really hard to hope.
They feel like abandoning hope is abandoning all reason to keep trying and that is what broke for me.
I had a series of life experiences that damaged the link between my assessment of whether or not a desired outcome is possible and whether or not I think feel or plan anything about that desired outcome.
I lost my ability to justify my thoughts feelings and plans based on what I thought was possible.
Super short version I felt totally helpless that nothing I do made a difference that what I did might in fact make the world a worse place but then I found what I call the secret medicine.
Hope is a sustaining energy.
It keeps us working through trials when we're being challenged but it is contingent on that assessment of the probability of that desired outcome.
What Adrienne Martin showed me was the language for a non-contingent sustaining energy which cannot be interfered with by any assessment no matter how dire of the probability of a desired outcome.
That non-contingent sustaining energy is what Adrienne Martin calls an unimaginable hope.
What's a name for the emotion when you have no reason to believe that a wanted future may come to pass and yet you continue to work toward it just as if you did believe you could make a difference.
What is the name for that emotion when you walk toward the world you want knowing that each step might be off a cliff?
Adrienne Martin calls that faith and look at my atheist and yet I walk with this thing she calls faith because I know what my job is here on earth and I'm gonna keep doing my job even though I have a good reason to believe I will never see the world I am working to create.
My faith is not in any supernatural critter but in the arc of history bending toward justice as long as all of us keep pressing it toward justice.
I think this unimaginable hope is what Sonya Renee Taylor talks about when she imagines her ancestors being told they were free.
She said all their food, shelter, meager resources tied up in the institution of slavery.
I am sure they feared what would happen as a civil war raged.
She said slavery was what was known freedom was the vast unknowable except in their souls in their very bones.
She said I think unimaginable hope too is what Sonya Renee Taylor invokes in her prayer for the collective.
She says I found myself today saying please life surprise me.
Shock me with your grace astound me with your kindness.
Show me that there is something beyond what it is that I imagined.
Show me what is beyond me because what is beyond me is what we need right now.
What is beyond us?
What we know?
What can be known?
To be clear she also talks about imaginable hope in beautiful inspiring and concrete terms when she talks about Terry Marshall's description of our world's challenges as a battle of imagination.
She says our assignment is to imagine a different world and I can do that.
You can too.
I hope you will.
It is a powerful practice to imagine the desired outcome.
Imagine the world you want.
That's not what's broken in me.
What's broken in me is not my ability to imagine but the sense that I'm justified in believing that I can create the outcome I imagine.
What's not broken in me is my sense that I am justified in believing that I am working to create what I can't imagine.
What Sonya Renee Taylor calls the vast unknowable faith is an unimaginable hope.
A hope for something we believe without reason is on the other side of the mountain.
At its simplest I want to offer a different metaphor, a different poem, one that sustains me in a way that the little bird and her song can't because my little bird of hope stopped singing a couple of decades ago and I kept living.
It's a bit of a poem by Rumi because as a 21st century middle class hoist lady, of course I relate so hard to a Sufi medieval poet but translated by Coleman it goes, "There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope."
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
The secret medicine I've been given is faith that something I'll never experience is on the other side of the mountain and so I climb.
Some days when my depression is extra bad my unimaginable hope, the secret medicine, is my belief without reason that even though I am in the deepest darkness my next step will not be off a cliff but onto solid ground.
I had a recent bout of depression where each step felt like a spongy marsh that could easily seem to be leading to a mire as each step got spongier and spongier and eventually it would swallow me and yet I kept moving forward by which I mean breathing in and breathing out because I believe in whatever it is that's on the other side of the marsh.
It's what I can't imagine with my human mind.
It's what I can't ask anyone else to describe because it is beyond human knowing and that is how I survive.
Sometimes even thrive without a functioning little bird.
My hope is broken.
Look there's a lot of ways that I live with depression that doesn't follow standard therapeutic procedures and I know that this is not for everyone.
Adrienne Martin herself called unimaginable hope rather esoteric.
I don't even recommend it.
If hope is an option for you do hope.
Hope is amazing.
I remember what it feels like to hope and I don't want to talk about how it felt to lose it.
Rumi's secret medicine is for those of us who hurt so hard we can't help but even if your hope works maybe you have someone in your life whose hope is broken and maybe you can talk to them about the secret medicine.
I've done other unorthodox things to cope with my depression.
I have befriended my despair instead of saying that it's a liar.
I developed a trusting and respectful relationship with it but that was really hard work that I only did because I had to when I realized I would probably never live without it so I might as well be on good terms with it like a neighbor you don't like who will never ever move away.
Most people's depression moves away.
I live with the kind of intractical depression that sets up camp in your brain early in life and for a couple decades now I have done that without the thing I would call hope.
In its place, I'm sorry if you can hear my cat yelling she's 18 she loves to complain it's her favorite hobby, but in the place of hope I grew a thing the moral philosophers call faith.
I know what my job is and I will do my job every day that I am capable of doing it not believe I can rid the world of cisheteropatriarchal misogyny but because I have faith that this is the path that leads ultimately to an unimaginable future if you can hope hope.
If you can't hope maybe read some moral psychology how we hope but Adrienne Martin it's pretty dance and technical there's a there's a lot of Kant in it I'll be honest but if hope has stopped working for you I want you to know that there is something else beyond hope that is not contingent on whether or not you think you can make a difference it's contingent on absolutely nothing because anything you were never reasoned into you can never be reasoned out of you cannot reason me out of my faith that the arc of history bends toward justice or my belief that way more than half of us are working to drag that arc of history closer and closer to a better world [Music]