An Alternative to Hope

Or, The Secret Medicine for When the Thing With Feathers Stop Singing

I was inspired to make this video obviously because of John Green’s June 25^th video, where he talks about taking a break from vlogbrothers because: depression, and he concludes with his familiar assurance that despair is a lie, hopelessness is a lie, that life is meaningful, and your life matters. He says he’s going to spend the month of July reminding himself that Emily Dickinson was right, “that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

You can watch the video here or read it below:

This is John’s original video:

And this is Amelia’s response to my video:

And here’s my video in email form, for those who prefer not to watch videos:

I was inspired to make this video obviously because of John Green’s June 25^th video, where he talks about taking a break from vlogbrothers because: depression, and he concludes with his familiar assurance that despair is a lie, hopelessness is a lie, that life is meaningful, and your life matters. He says he’s going to spend the month of July reminding himself that Emily Dickinson was right, “that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

There are a lot of people in the comments of that video saying how much they need to hear that, how much it helps them, and if you’re one of those people, that’s fantastic. Hopelessness is a lie and despair is a lie, and this video is not for you. You can still hear the little Bird perched in your soul, singing the tune without the words.

This video is for the people you might have in your life who, for their sanity, to save their lives, need to abandon hope. Because for some of us, there comes a point, when you hurt so hard that your brain pushes you off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair and you land badly and when you drag yourself up, you find that the little Bird, of the Emily Dickinson poem, is broken. Maybe it’s on life support and you can’t bring yourself to pull the plug because what the hell kind of damaged person can go on without a working hope?

Well. It happened to me in the early 2000’s. My hope broke. The song stopped. Maybe it’s not permanent, but it’s been 20 years and in that time I’ve managed to finish two advanced degrees and write three New York Times bestselling self-help books without it, so I think I have a viable alternative to offer, for those who find themselves in need of such desperate measures.

Let me preface this by saying that nothing I can say takes the place of medical care, including therapy and, if it’s right for you, medication. I’ve been medicated the whole time and it has definitely helped to keep me alive.

So. To explain my alternative to hope, first I have to explain what “hope” means to me. Moral philosopher and author of “How We Hope” Adrienne Martin developed an “incorporation model” that formulates hope as “a desire for an outcome and the belief that the outcome is possible but not certain” and you use your assessment of its possibility as justification for feelings, thoughts, and plans.

Got that? Hope is justifying your feelings, thoughts, and plans based on your assessment that a desired outcome is possible.

Martin’s point of view derives from her work in phase 1 trials for cancer drugs. Phase 1 medical trials aren’t about proving a drug is effective; they’re just about proving a drug isn’t dangerous. Cancer patients for whom no other treatment has been effective may participate in phase 1 trials not because they had any reason to believe the drug would treat their cancer—it would be a wild coincidence if it did, one in a thousand—but because they wanted to be part of the scientific process that made better cancer treatment available to people in the future. But some people… had hope. “Sure it’s one in a thousand, but maybe I’m the one,” they might think. Whereas other people basically had it the other way around, “Okay sure it might help, but it’s one in a thousand.”

In this way of thinking about hope, the thing with feathers sings its song as long as it can justify its singing with its assessment of the probability of the desired outcome. And for some people, one in thousand is plenty.

The reason hope matters, by this definition, is that a lot of people would use their assessment that something is unlikely as a justification to do nothing.

No hope, no action. And that’s why most people cling really hard to hope; they feel like abandoning hope is abandoning all reason to keep trying.

And that’s what broke for me. I had a series of life experiences that broke the link between my assessment of whether or not a desired outcome is possible and whether or not I think, feel, or plan anything about that desirable outcome. I lost my ability to justify my thoughts, feelings, and plans based on what I thought was possible.

And that brings me to the secret medicine.

Hope is a sustaining energy, it keeps us working through trials when we’re being challenged, but it is contingent on that assessment of the probability of that desirable outcome.

But there is a noncontingent sustaining energy, which cannot be interfered with by any assessment, no matter how dire, of the probability of a desired outcome.

That noncontingent sustaining energy is an unimaginable hope.

What’s it called, when you have no reason to believe a wanted future may come to pass and yet you continue to work toward it just as if you did believe you could make a difference? What’s the name for that emotion, when you walk toward the world you want, knowing that each next step might be off a cliff?

Adrienne Martin calls it faith.

And look, I'm an atheist. Yet I walk with faith because I know what my job is here on Earth, and I'm going to do my job even though I have good reason to believe I will never see the world I am working to create. My faith is not in any supernatural critter, but in the arc of history bending toward justice as long as all of us keep pressing it toward justice.

I think this unimaginable hope what Sonya Renee Taylor talks about when she imagines her ancestors being told they were free. She said, “All their food, shelter, meager resource tied up in the institution of slavery. I am sure they feared what would happen as the Civil War raged. Slavery was what was known. Freedom was the vast unknowable except in their souls, in their very bones.”

I think unimaginable hope is what she invokes in her Prayer for the Collective, when she says,

“I found myself today saying, please.

Life, surprise me.

Shock me with your grace.

Astound me with your kindness.

Show me that there is something beyond

what it is that I imagined.

Show me what is beyond me.

Because what is beyond me

is what we need right now.

What is beyond us, what we know.

What can be known.

What is the predictable outcome.”

To be clear, She also talks about imaginable hope in beautiful, inspiring, and concrete terms when she talks about Terry Marshall’s description of our world’s challenges as “a battle of imagination.” She says, “Our assignment is to imagine a different world” And I can do that. You can too. I hope you will. It’s a powerful practice.

What’s broken in me is not my ability to imagine but the sense that I’m justified in believing I can create the outcome I imagine.

What’s not broken in me is my sense that I am justified in believing I’m working to create what I can’t imagine, the vast unknowable. Faith is an unimaginable hope, a hope for something we believe without reason is on the other side of the mountain.

At its simplest, I want to offer a different metaphor, a different poem, one that sustains me in ways that the little Bird and her song cannot, because my little bird of hope stopped singing and I kept living.

It’s a bit of a poem by Rumi translated by Coleman:

There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

The secret medicine I’ve been given is faith in something I’ll never experience; it’s on the other side of the mountain and so I climb the mountain. Some days my unimaginable hope is my belief, without reason, that even though I’m deep in the darkness, my next step will not be off a cliff but onto solid ground.

I had a recent bout of depression where each step felt like a spongy marsh that could easily seem to be leading to mire that would swallow me. Yet I kept moving forward, because I believe in whatever’s on the other side of the marsh.

It’s what I can’t imagine with my limited human mind, what I can’t ask anyone else to describe to me because it is beyond human knowing. And that is how I survive and even thrive without a functioning little Bird.

If you need to stick to Emily Dickinson let’s try her prose. In a letter she wrote, “The sailor cannot see the north but trusts the needle can.” 

Look there’s a lot about the way I live with my depression that doesn’t follow standard therapeutic protocols and I know that this is not for everyone. Adrienne Martine herself calls “unimaginable hope” “rather esoteric.” I don’t even recommend it; if hope is an option for you, DO HOPE. HOPE IS AMAZING. I remember hope. Let’s not talk about how it felt to lose it.

Rumi’s secret medicine is only for those of us who hurt so hard we CAN’T hope.

But even if your hope works, maybe you have someone in your life whose hope is broken, and maybe you can talk to them about the secret medicine.

I have also befriended my despair and developed a trusting and respectful relationship with it. But that was hard work that I only did because I had to when I realized that I would probably never be rid of it, so I might as well be on good terms with it, like a neighbor who will never, ever move away. Most people’s depression moves away.

I live with the intractable kind of depression that sets up camp in your brain early in your life. And for a couple decades now I have done that without the thing I would call “hope.” In its place grew something moral philosophers call “faith.” I know what my job is, and I will do it every day that I am capable of doing it, not because I believe I will rid the world of cisheteropatriarchal misogyny, but because I have faith that it is the path that leads to an unimaginable future.

If you can hope, hope. If you can’t hope, maybe read How We Hope, a moral psychology by Adrienne Martin. It’s pretty dense and technical, there’s a lot of Kant.

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Stay safe and see you next time.