Friends since school we’d drifted apart. Like broken pieces of a boat which, having sailed quite peacefully for years, had run aground dramatically and without warning. Drawn, defeated, held firmly in the grim clutches of alcoholism and with a recent cancer diagnosis I felt as if I had come face to face with a living ghost. Someone wholly familiar yet completely unknown. I was certain that this late November evening was to be the last we would spend together. When you have fallen as far as you can hope becomes the only strategy available.
Drinking coffee and chatting as if nothing is amiss Martin asks a friend a question “So, you’re not using anymore at all then?” The answer is hesitant but definite “No, I haven’t touched anything since I came out of rehab”. The hope that at this, his twenty something attempt, something may have finally clicked into place is undermined by the telltale garble of recent cocaine use. However far you have fallen when hope is lost there is no strategy on earth that will pull you clear of trouble.
I remember what it was like to lose sight of hope, sitting on a bench in a quiet park with the sun shining and people walking their dogs as if everything were quite normal. It is a terrifying place to be because nothing leads to anywhere in any direction, but standing where you are is interminably painful too. From this point hope feels much less a verb and more an elusive noun.
Hope is created, it is grown. Like a flower springing up from a tiny seed the cultivation of hope relies on a belief that change is possible even if it seems absurdly unlikely. We are surrounded by the unlikely and have lived through decades and centuries of it. When hope is not a strategy then it must be what comes before, a foundation on which change is built. Without hope we have nothing.
Every day I work with recovery and I know it to be dependent on hope, that the first and most powerful step is not just fuelled by hope but is actually hope itself. When someone new sits opposite me and responds to the question “How can I help?” with “I don’t really know” I am aware that hope has entered the room, maybe alone.
Hope is a gift we make to ourselves.
It wasn’t the last time I saw my friend. He stopped drinking against all seemingly insurmountable odds and pulled back from the brink in a turn of events which still seems extraordinarily unlikely. But hope does not respect the statistics of recovery because they only matter when you need a reason to let go of yourself, a justification for continued suffering. When hope is real it is not only self perpetuating but it is stronger than any other strategy you can ever dream of.
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