How can hope help when today is still painful?

In Taking care of myself, Innocent describes being deeply hurt by another person and losing his way. As he redirects his attention towards healing and his own aspirations, the future he imagines gives him a reason to care for himself.

Imagine an evening after a relationship has ended. You have spent an hour rereading a message. There is no new information in it, but it is difficult to turn away: what happened still seems to require an explanation, and the person who hurt you has not given one you can live with.

Then you remember a friend asking whether you might come over at the weekend. You do not feel ready to be good company. You are unsure you will enjoy it. But you would like, eventually, to have evenings that contain more than this message. You reply that you could come for a little while.

The reply changes very little about the loss. It gives something else a place in the days ahead. Making a meal afterwards can belong to the same small willingness to continue, rather than an attempt to prove you have recovered. You still hurt while doing it.

What are you asking the future to do?#

Hope becomes precarious when only one event is allowed to make life worth attending to. If the person comes back, you will begin living properly again. If they apologise, you will look after yourself. Until then, everything waits on a decision you cannot make for them.

It is understandable to want that particular change. Yet there is a difference between wanting it and making every possibility of a worthwhile future depend on it. You may also want friendship, useful work, ordinary pleasure or the chance to know yourself outside this hurt. Those wishes deserve attention while the unanswered question remains unanswered.

This does not require replacing the lost relationship quickly or finding a lesson that makes the pain worthwhile. In the chapter, hope turns the author’s attention towards his own life. Its practical value lies in what that attention makes worth caring for now.

Nor does the possibility of change establish a timetable. A weekend visit might be awkward. Tomorrow may be another hard day. Neither would prove that accepting the invitation was pointless. You made room for company because company matters to you, with no promise that it would remove the hurt on arrival.

Some days even a modest hope is hard to feel. That difficulty says nothing shameful about your worth or effort. You can let someone know that the day is difficult and accept company or practical help without first producing a convincing account of how things will improve. Present care does not have to wait until you can picture the future clearly.