Finding Hope When All Feels Lost – Finding Joy in the Midst of Pain

https://youtu.be/ZaIKyG0a1uI

With the recent 2024 Election, many feel more hopeless than ever and I don’t blame them but in spite of it all, here’s how I’m finding new ways to be hopeful.

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When I was a kid, I remember one day asking my mother a question. My mother was born in the 1950s, and I remember asking her. In the 1950s, it was illegal for black people to vote. In some places, it was illegal for black people to get educated. There was segregation. You couldn’t drink out of the same water fountain, ride in the same places on the bus. Schools were separated. There were a lot of things different in the 1950s versus the way they are today, or even when I was growing up.

Learning about that really confused my young middle school mind. I remember one day asking my mother, “Were black people happy?” Because it’s like, how do you have happiness, joy, hope, all of the ingredients to positive mental health, when your rights are constantly under attack.

In my head, I just assumed black people just walked around miserable, sad, depressed and frustrated, every single moment of every single day. But I would watch movies of that era, and people were laughing, and they were in concerts, and they were making music, and they were living life. And I asked my mother, what was it like then? Were you guys happy? And my mother told me, basically it was both.

We were frustrated, and angry, and sad, and anxious. But we also had to live life. And we also found joy. And we also found camaraderie. And we found happiness amongst the chaos.

So when I think about what’s going on in America in my lifetime, this is the most unease I have ever felt. Because I do feel like in the past decade, it just feels like the rights of minorities, immigrants, gay and lesbian people, trans people, anybody who doesn’t fit the status quo, feels like the rights of those people is under attack. And it is scary.

The hardest thing for me is when someone is running for president, overtly using homophobic, xenophobic, racist language, and seeing people that I know love and care about, not reject it. It’s caused hurt, and harm, and anxiety, and fear.

So what do we do?

We take the lesson from my mother’s generation, and we live life.

We find happiness, and joy, and excitement, camaraderie. We find it because it’s there.

I keep taking myself back to my community. Black people are so strong. We’ve had to show our resilience and our ability to carry on amongst difficulties times for a very, very long time.

There’s a scene in the movie Glory that I think demonstrates this better than anything else. Glory is about a man named Robert Shaw and how he took command of an all black Brigade called the 54th Massachusetts during the Civil War.

In the movie, they took letters that the real Robert Shaw wrote to his family. Of course, he died in the war, famously, and he asked to be buried with his all black soldiers. Well, he didn’t ask. They captured him and buried him in South Carolina with his all black soldiers. And they did it to disgrace him. And his parents said he would have considered it a huge honor to have been buried with his comrades.

So that was Robert Shaw, and he wrote letters to his parents while he was leading the 54th Massachusetts. And in one of those letters, he wrote that they are really working hard during the day, doing all of these really hard things. But at night, he said, “No ivory tooth is hidden.” Meaning, they’re smiling, and playing, and laughing. And he said they must have learned this in slavery to be able to just switch their brains after a hard day of training as soldiers to be laughing and joking and playing around with each other.

That’s us. We have found happiness and joy where it’s really hard to find, in circumstances where it’s really difficult. We’ve been demonstrating that skill for a very, very long time.

Again, I think it’s unfair, but I want to take the lesson from all of the generations that came before us.

It’s time to carry on.

Regardless of the outcome of this election.

We just have to carry on and push forward.

So, what’s the best thing we can do for our mental health?

Continue to live, and find the ingredients for happiness, because they’re there, regardless of the circumstances. We’ve known that for many, many generations before us. And it will always be true going forward.