Hope is a Power-Up
reflections on hope and a Goldie the Car story
I wrote the following italicized bit over a year ago but never published. I think I was afraid that voicing this hope loudly would somehow jinx it. Lord knows, we have had more than enough false hopes before. And far too much hinged on this being real hope for me to take any chances.
I didn’t want to find myself having to walk back my hope. again. And, I think I needed to believe that hope, while it often felt just out of reach, is still tangible and worth searching for. That even though we may not always know what we are looking for, we can still find it. Even at the very bottom of the darkness.
We have a new diagnosis, which answers so many things I have been trying to figure out for years, and it also leaves me completely heartbroken and sorrowful. I have been struggling with regret for not knowing, regret for not trying to do something sooner. Regret for not making different decisions… all of the things.
My therapist tells me that I did what I knew to do at the time, that I used all the tools I had to help the situation. She tells me I have done everything right and she hopes I will be able to let go of those feelings eventually… time will tell.
My world feels so claustrophobic and isolated, and yet I’m finally at a place where I am gaining new community and feel encouraged in my crafts and interests.
I’m looking for joy everywhere I can: We have baby chicks, a silly new kitty cat, and someone recently hired me to make tiny needle felted figures for them to turn into earrings. These things are good and grounding. Hopeful. Especially in a time of so much turmoil on the national and international scale (not to mention at home).
And right now, I’m pondering on this: Hope is a power-up. Where sometimes Hope presents in a gentle breeze or a good cup of coffee, she can also present through a begging, exhausted sigh, “oh, hard times, come again no more.” I don’t particularly like not knowing where Hope will be found next, but I do know that tiny needle felted mushrooms and good lattes help tremendously (and medication!).
“They” never said it could be this hard, and I never fathomed it.
Anyone else know what I mean?
Today, I’m glad to be able to read that back and respond to my own words with a sigh not from hope exhausted, but from hope encouraged.
The way forward is still long, but where before it seemed an endless, open, desert horizon where any direction could be the right (or wrong) way to go and where paths we thought were right to follow only turned out to be dead ends, we are now finally on a road. And not just any road— this road is paved.
The summer after college graduation, I went to visit a friend who lived in Banner Elk, NC at the time. I was living just outside of Charlotte then, so it wasn’t supposed to be that long or difficult of a drive— just a few hours. I plugged my super fancy GPS into my car’s cigarette lighter plug1, typed in her address, and off I went in Goldie, my little gold Mitsubishi Galant, all by myself to see my friend and her baby.
I was an hour away from her house when my GPS told me to turn onto a dirt road. I could see it was going to be a few miles on this road, but I thought it would be… fine.
At this point in the story, Older Me says, “DON’T TURN! IT’S A MOUNTAINOUS TRAP!”
It was fine… at first, but then I found myself going up and down very steep, very bumpy inclines that my little car was NOT equipped for. And when the up and down steep bumpy inclines WOULD NOT STOP HAPPENING, and when I realized I did not have cell service, I became panicky. Do you know how slow you have to drive on dirt mountain roads in a 2-wheel drive car?? Do you know how long a 6 mile drive is on a steep, bumpy, dirt mountain road??
I pleaded for God to get me to the next paved road NOW more times than I can count, but I think it was the white-knuckling begging to Goldie to “just keep going” that really got me there (currently imagining me and my car covered in a Super Star power-up, racing slowly.).
After a very long, very stressful 45 minutes on that dirt road, I finally saw another road coming into view on the GPS. You can imagine my relief when it turned out to be paved.2
As I have come to think of hope like power-ups in Super Mario, I think I am learning to keep looking under as many blocks as I can along my path, even if most of them leave me empty-handed. Because sometimes I get surprised— sometimes under one of those blocks, hope turns out to be a Super Star, offering not just a layer of protection against the challenging stuff happening around me, but also a boost of faith to keep me going. I can do this.
But I want to take a moment and acknowledge that in the times I have been in long periods of confusion, sorrow, or depression, I have been tempted to stop looking for hope. And even now that I am recovering, sometimes it is still hard. Hell, sometimes I have stopped altogether. When you’re surviving, you don’t have time for games, let’s be honest. I think this is where “hope is a team sport” comes in.3 This is when we need other people to do the heavy lifting, and find the hope for us.
And then heaven forbid false hopes show up… desperation for relief has blinded me from being able to see them for what they are in the past. But I am honing my ability to spot the patterns and signs and I am also learning to leave a bit of grace for them in my heart. After all, false hopes have had a hand in helping along the way, too (though not pleasant, often painful, and regularly humbling, to say the least).
I had a few of options for how to handle that scary dirt road once I realized I was in a serious predicament: I could try to turn around and risk getting stuck, I could stop and wait (not really sure why I would have done this, but it was an option none-the-less), or I could continue on in hope that my car would make it and that I would see my friend.
The faith I had on that long dirt road was in trusting my car was solid enough she would not give up on me; I found a power-up when that road came into view on the GPS, and maybe a Super Star power-up actually was covering my car in safety without me realizing...
We don’t always know where the next boost will come from, we don’t even have a guarantee that every situation will have hope waiting for us around the corner. But what I know for certain is that if we don’t keep trying to find it, we could miss out on a really memorable, slightly embarrassing, totally-worth-it story.
See you soon.
<3,
Steph/Anie
P.S. I imported some past blog posts to my Substack that I didn’t want to lose. They help tell our story, and I can see how this ongoing search for hope and healing has been non-linear and full of false-hopes (that had their place!), and also some beautiful truths, wisdom, and power-ups. You can find these posts all the way at the beginning page… This one in-particular is some of my best work, I think. Thanks for reading. <3
I was “too high-tech” for MapQuest print outs by this point in my life…
I got to my friend’s house just fine and I DID NOT take the dirt road on the way home. But, my car and I didn’t quite make it back before she gave out. I stopped at my post office to check the mail and when I got back in the car to drive the rest of the way home, she said “I’m done” and refused to drive the last 2 miles of our trip. She had to be towed the rest of the way. 😅