In her book “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness,” writer Austin Channing Brown says she has “learned not to fear the death of hope. In order for me to stay in this work, hope must die.” She writes: “I cannot hope in whiteness, I cannot hope in white institutions or white America, I cannot hope in lawmakers or politicians. I cannot hope in misquoted wisdom from MLK, superficial ethnic heritage celebrations or love that is aloof. I cannot even even hope in myself. I am no one’s savior.” Instead, she has decided to embrace the shadow of hope, opting to continue “working in the dark not knowing if anything I do will ever make a difference.”
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This has been my slow, lifelong realization. Hope is the enemy. Hope provides the brain an easy path to complacency. I didn’t believe it when Obama talked about Hope, because even though I liked the big, aspirational message, I couldn’t believe in hope as a good thing. Hope has betrayed me almost every time, and the times it didn’t were happy coincidences.
We don’t need hope. We need work in the face of the possibility that our work might mean nothing and do nothing. We need to do the work to figure out what has a great shot at working, and then we have to put in the work to try to make those things work.
We need work.
And I suck at work. I live my life in near-constant feelings of fear, shame, helplessness, uselessness, and emptiness. And I used to think that if I just tried to avoid danger and pass the time, spending my time looking for things that made me feel happy and motivated, then something would click.
But nothing has clicked in years, and I’ve had little happiness and produced little that could even possibly be of value.
For me, at least, it’s time to discard hope and happiness as things to seek, and instead embrace work as much as I can. To work despite fear, despite depression, despite emptiness, despite feeling helpless, despite feeling ineffective, despite feeling unvalued, despite feeling hopeless. If happiness or hope come to me as I work, then great, but I am carving a marker into my life for this day forward — “Never give in to the siren’s call to seek after hope and happiness. That call always leads to destruction and death. Work, and maybe the warmth of company, purpose, meaningfulness, happiness, and comfort will surround you because you work.”
And at the very least, if no happiness, no hope, no companionship, no personal value, no appreciation, and no effectiveness in the world come from me working, I will be able to have pride in myself for workingdespite all of the horrible things in my life and in me. I will be able to feel justified in feeling proud of myself for overcoming things that I did not overcome before — not as a matter of being done with them, but as a matter of going on despite their heavy weight and their persistence in plaguing me.