My bible: creative hopelessness

In creative hopelessness you acknowledge that the ways you’ve been trying to avoid pain and suffering haven’t worked, all the things you’ve tried to feel better haven’t done the job long-term, so you’re left with nothing but to accept that the pain will be there and live your life anyway. It sounds harsh, but the idea is that when you’ve fully exhausted your resistance all that’s left is to embrace it. 

I feel like in the depths of my teen despair, as I desired  hope that never came, I had to develop a relationship with the absence of hope. 

When I was 8 I was pulled out of school and put into home schooling. My mom bought us a curriculum (LIFEPAC, iykyk). My dad was supposed to “teach” us. What actually happened is I spent all my time home and largely alone. 

When I was 10 we moved to Alaska, away from everyone and everything I’d ever known.

When I was 14 my dad left.

[not pictured: lots of other hard things that I won’t talk about publicly]

My mom fell apart, emotionally (physically would come slightly later). 

I basically spent two years either in my room or trying to take care of my mom. I remember she often struggled to get out of bed and I was afraid she’d get fired and we’d be homeless.

At some point when I was 16, something in me awoke, I used to feel like it said “we can’t live like this” but I think, more accurately, it was “we can’t die like this,”. I had to try.

Now, as I’ve talked about before, I have a fraught relationship with trying. 

But everything contains everything. 

I had nothing but delusion that maybe I didn’t have to die in that house, in my depression room, cut off from the rest of the world.

I learned to drive.

I got a job.

I went to church.

I made friends.

In those four simple sentences are so many emotions, failures, and stories that I don’t have space for here. I just want to name that none of this was simple or easy for my younger self, and she actually accomplished a lot with very little in a short amount of time with very little support. Much like my mom. 

This is the context of what I was experiencing when I was marking up this bible, a lonely, parentified, heavily masking and desperate 16-17 year old - who was always waiting for another shoe to drop, and man, they kept dropping.

As a “believer”, I knew that I should feel hope that things would get better. And I also knew that it wasn’t fully okay to expect things to get better (I highlighted almost all of Job). 

It was another social game I wasn’t good at playing - having hope/fatih because God is good and rewards his servants, but also he doesn’t have to and his plan is unknowable (but definitely good) so if he doesn’t help you it's for the best. And maybe he’s not helping you because you suck and don’t deserve it. And also you wanting him to help you might piss him off and he’ll humble you more. 

Some samples of my highlights. Keep in mind, there are many celebratory and glowing passages across the Bible, I didn’t highlight those. This isn’t me cherry-picking, this is just where I was:

“Therefore man cannot discover anything about his future”

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him:” 

“where is my hope…in the dust”’

“He wounds, but he also binds up; he injures but his hands also heal”

“To him belong belong strength and victory; both deceived and deceiver are his”

My search for hope also fed my unworthiness because I’m a fundamentally curious person. I love to learn, I love to approach something that feels incomprehensible and try to understand, even the smallest piece of it - but then I’d feel guilty. I’d write over and over about how it’s okay that no one “gets” the wisdom of God, that not knowing is the whole point of faith.

Between the hope that never showed up, and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to understand or question it - I gave up. I didn’t think, at that time, that there was anything “better” than God, I just wasn’t getting anything out of it. 

I didn’t even feel like he was there. 

But what was there? What did I feel and know really well? Hopelessness. Darkness. Despair. Anxiety. Those things were real. And so I slowly stopped chasing something that never showed up, and I started hanging out with the dark rather than only being afraid of it. Leaning into hopelessness ended up opening the door to hope.