This is the eighth in the series of prompts for creative projects that you might want to submit to the anthology of hope.

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“Well we have to be realistic about things.” How often does that get said in life? It’s true that living in cloud cuckoo land does not serve us. The it’s fun to make up stories about things magically fixing if we just hold on and wait long enough as I suggested in post number seven. It’s fun and might help us lighten up when things are heavy but it doesn’t usually do more than that. Nor do encouraging comments like when the psychiatrist who gave me a diagnosis at the age of twenty told me I should be happy about it because most people with that label stopped feeling so bad they attempted suicide by the time they were forty and I just had to wait.

However most of the time we live with uncertainty. We don’t know how things will pan out or what will follow. In that set up a more pessimistic guess is not more realistic than a more hopeful one. However whichever guess we make tends to shape our choices about what we do and don’t do. Our brains are even set up to notice information that fits our personal veiwpoint and filter information that doesn’t so whatever we believe is realistic has a better chance of becoming our reality.

This really showed up for me when I had a care coordinator try to convince me I needed to be realistic that I would never leave hospital again. It really helped entrench me in my more hopeful veiw that being in hospital was now causing most of my problems and that to succeed I needed the basic information about activities that would help me find friends in my new city and to come off the medication that wasn’t working for me and get the treatment I needed for my physical health problems so I had then energy to live my life.

He thought I was being unrealistic and warned me that I would be disappointed. Disappointment is painful but I believe that hopelessness is more dangerous. I asked for a new care coordinator and did what I needed to based on what I hoped was true. Now four years later I’m not only in the community living a life I love but the documents written by my new care coordinator highlight over and over that being in a hospital setting causes my mental health to deteriorate. My hopeful reality has become evidence backed reality.

Has this ever happened to you? I would love to share your descriptions of times when you hoped things could be better and got what you hoped for in the anthology. You story may be just what someone needs to turn things around.

This is the eighth in the series of prompts for creative projects that you might want to submit to the anthology of hope.

Previous full list next

You can find the details on how to submit work to the anthology here.