A 5-Year-Old Boy Lost for 26 Years Will Help You Relearn What Hope Is
Hope is a survival mechanism that can get you through anything.
Hope is incredibly easy to forget.
To be hopeful is underrated. Rather than present medals to men of war, I long for the day we take a bird’s-eye view and consider awarding medals of hope. A medal of hope is the real medal of honor.
I admire hope because I spent so much of my life running on empty. My human programming had turned every question into a response that contained the answer “what’s the point?”
That’s what mental illness really does to you. It robs you of your hope. It creates a make-believe world in your head full of hope stealers. Your hope levels become so low you’re not even sure you will wake-up anymore. A lack of hope drives you towards the edge of the cliff, closer to the black that lies beneath.
I rediscovered hope. I accidentally started listening to stories of other people’s hope. These stories were express delivered by audiotapes from the 90s. A 7-foot giant shared these stories. He told naive people like me, “Anything is possible.” At first, I thought he was a liar. Then I listened to his stories enough that I brainwashed myself into believing in hope again.
