The one thing I won't give up

I am an eternal optimist. It's in my bones. But I wasn't programmed to be this way. I was programmed to be afraid of the future, every one around me, sleep, the dark, and the monsters underneath my bed. I was AFRAID.

I first recognized this part of me when I had a total freakout in class one morning, one of my first graduate school classes. The discussion on the table was about the ability of persons to change, and the simple answer is that some people will never change. Some people, it would seem, cannot change.

But the question I was asking, and thus the answer, was entirely different. I believe that people have the capacity to change, that God's divine goodness allows it, that this is grace, and that to deny it is to miss out on it. Several people disagreed, vehemently; I was shocked.

I think I raised my voice. I think I almost cried; my face was undoubtedly red. I was furious, raging from the inside. How dare anyone question that change is possible, that people can change? I saw it so clearly, but I couldn't communicate that which was central to my entire being.

My life up to that moment, was filled with grief, with loss, with longing. I didn't know enough to label it with those words because I was too busy feeling my own pain, but I knew enough to know that life sucked. I knew enough to know that life was not worth living all the time, that I myself oftentimes didn't want to live, and that I didn't choose to live the life I was given at conception (I use that word to avoid causing my readers any trouble continuing to read).

I didn't choose my parents or what they gave me. But damn-it, if I didn't believe with my whole being that life didn't have to suck. I still believe this, even when I'm so sad that I can't see any hope, I still believe this. Because there's a little girl inside of me who wants to die, and I'm never going to tell her that it doesn't get better, that it will in fact get worse for a while, a long while that will feel like forever. I won't tell her that. She deserves to be lied to.

Sometimes I sound deluded or naive when I talk this way. I recognize that. But if I sound that way, it's because I choose a life of delusion over the truth. I can live each day fully with hope, but sometimes, with the reality set before me at any given moment, there is not enough hope in the world to keep me alive. It is then that I lie, knowingly. It will get better. It will get better. It will get better. Because people can change, and circumstances can change, and life as you now know it, can change.