Jeanette Winterson, Written On The Body

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I will literally never believe your 20s are meant to be the prime of your life. The years immediately following your adolescence? When you’re entrenched in the battlefields of un/learning, healing, and growing? Yeah right

“It takes courage to grieve, to honor the pain we carry. We can grieve in tears or in meditative silence, in prayer or in song. In touching the pain of recent and long-held griefs, we come face to face with our genuine human vulnerability, with helplessness and hopelessness. These are the storm clouds of the heart.”

— Jack Kornfield, A meditation on grief 

To whom do I owe the biggest apology? No one's been crueller than I've been to me.

— Alanis Morissette, "Sorry to Myself", Under Rug Swept

Things to Do If You Feel Hopeless

Hopelessness can often be a sign of depression or simply unhealthy thinking. Here are a few things to do if you feel this way.

1. Recognize situations are not black and white. The world is not wholly good nor wholly evil. Doing a bad thing does not make you entirely nonredeemable. A bad thing happening to you does not mean you did something to deserve it. A bad thing happening in the world does not mean the world is bad overall.

2. Work on your self-care, especially if you have a history of depression or other mental illnesses. Try things like affirmations, journaling, writing your upsetting feelings on cards and tearing them up, and communicating with someone close about how you are feeling.

3. Stay healthy. Keep yourself hydrated. Make sure you eat. Your body needs fuel to keep you happy!

4. Help others! We often feel better when we do something to help others. Donate to a cause, join an activism group, make masks for front-line workers, knit hats for patients undergoing chemotherapy, sew clothes for premature babies, donate blood or plasma, volunteer at an animal shelter or a food bank. There are so many ways you can contribute to the good in this world!

5. Be a part of something bigger. Join clubs and groups about causes you are passionate about, even if they are online right now. Talking to others and establishing connections with other people is important for us as humans; we are naturally social beings. 

6. Put the situation into perspective. This ties in with #1. Doing research into something that is getting you down can actually reveal that much is being done about it. We research new vaccines every day; new legislation is passed all the time to protect our fellow people. Chances are, if something wrong is happening, there are already people out there mobilizing to correct it. The situation is never hopeless, and you never stand alone.

“But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.”

— Frank Bidart, from “Advice to the Players,”  Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005)