#not even acknowledging that you project your traumas onto situations and never spending any amount of time self-reflecting?

[entitty]

somehow against all odds we're feeling good in this chilis tonight!!!!!!!!!! dealing with things in a healthy way is extremely cool and sexy actually

[dizexplainstheuniverse]

Give up hope.

If the past 2 years have taught me anything, it’s the art of giving up hope.

It’s about a human as it gets to dream, to wish, to imagine, to long for, to crave, to seek after something or someone to fulfil our wants, needs and desires.

Now, I fully believe in following the path of desire. I have absolutely no interest in sitting here and telling you I’m a desire-less puritan – quite the opposite. I’m full of unmet needs and aching yearnings.

However, I am going to try and communicate with you the importance of giving up hope...

Giving up hope doesn’t mean becoming hopeless, or admitting defeat, or becoming a lost cause.

Not at all.

What I’m talking about is giving up hope as an act of surrender.

So long as we hope, we project outwards onto the world, onto others, and unknowingly give our power away to ideas, concepts, and people. We make them, the other, something or someone outside of ourselves and outside of our control responsible for our individual happiness...

Let’s take a look at one very relatable example:

So, like many of us, I spent much of my time at the beginning of 2020 ‘hoping’ that the pandemic would all be over in a few weeks. I begged and bargained with the powers that be to make my lockdown misery end and clung desperately to hope. We all know this story too well…

Did it end?

Did it fuck.

Every few weeks ‘they’ would announce yet another indeterminable amount of time stuck in the prisons we called home.

My dreams of freedom were crushed, over and over again, until eventually – I gave up hope.

I remember thinking, “alright, I get it, screw this, I give up…” and I surrendered to the now. I stopped trying to fight reality with the idea of freedom I had constructed inside my mind in order to try and cope with the current situation.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this in my relationships (I’m the fucking Queen of projection - such a powerful imagination… ).

I was either too busy clinging to a version of a person I was hoping they’d turn out to be – or clinging to a situation, scenario or concept of what I hoped relationships could be like – to see what was right in front of me all along.

The grass was ALWAYS greener, or at least I hoped it would be…

The trouble with perpetual un-fulfilment, AKA addiction, AKA the human condition, is that we’re so damn distracted looking for the cure to our pain, hoping it’ll be in the next dopamine hit, that we are literally blind to the abundant nature of reality screaming out for our attention.

There’s a saying, right: “you wouldn’t know it, even if it hit you the face…”

When it comes to love, this has certainly been true for me.

Not only are we blinded by our past conditioning and traumas, but even when we begin to see the love, joy, pleasure, freedom, safety or belonging that’s right in front of us, we’re so fucking terrified to receive it and let it in that we subconsciously sabotage, resist, deny, reject and continue to fulfil the age-old narrative that “we’re just not good enough” or “we don’t deserve it” … or, if you’ve got an extra sneaky-smart psyche “it’s just not good enough for me!” … and off we go again, demanding more, more, more…

Of all the things, situations, and people, I’ve hoped for in my life, the moment I gave up hope and surrendered to the pain of my reality, that’s where true liberation was found.

The trouble is, we aren’t all well equipped or ready to fully feel the depths of the pain that giving up hope brings. It’s scary AF. Especially if we can’t yet see what’s right in front of us. So instead, we fight, we run, we freeze, we appease. We spend every waking moment of our lives looking for the next get-out of feeling the pain from our past.

There’s that other saying: “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” - classic. I bet you can relate to that one as well.

It was painful for me to give up on my hopes in relationships. So painful, that I’ve often stayed in alternatively slightly less painful relationships, substituting one pain for another, because facing the pain underneath of the thing I was masking was deeply terrifying – like, chilled-me-to-the-core kind of terrifying. So much so, my mind had created all sorts of elaborate tales about my unworthiness and lack of deservingness to protect me from experiencing that kind of pain ever again. And the masochist in me was indeed thriving.

It was too painful to give up hope, I needed it. I dug my claws in and I refused to let go. Because giving up hope, surrendering to what is real and present right now, meant having to acknowledge and grieve what I was never given but rightfully deserved. We’re talking, of course, about childhood wounds. The pain of that betrayal, the loss of love, care and nurturing from the adults in my life that were ‘supposed’ to care about me was truly heart breaking. Not only this, I felt just as terrified to receive it. I could not trust it that it would not come at a cost of more pain and suffering – just in another form – so why risk it?

I didn’t want to be alone - I couldn’t bare re-experiencing the pain of my loneliness and isolation. I didn’t want to be close - I couldn’t bare re-experiencing the pain of risking abandonment, rejection and neglect.

Oh, my sweet, agonising, disorganised attachment injury. Forever caught in a double-bind. “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it” – there’s another one for ya.

Truly, the only invitation I have for you here if you relate at all to these experiences, is please – give up hope.

Gently, slowly, with compassion and acceptance, feel your pain.

Hold yourself tenderly, allow your heart to break open. Soften your breath, your body, feel your feet on the ground. Release your tears, cry, scream, wail, rage, punch, roar – drop deep into the depths of your pain with such loving awareness for the universal experience of how painful it is to be a human being on this tortured planet.

You are not alone.

For I assure you, what awaits the other side is a freedom, a bliss, an ecstasy more real than any hope.

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