How to Maintain Hope in Difficult Times

By Faye Seidler

fayeseidler@gmail.com

My name is Faye Seidler and I’m a suicide prevention advocate and a champion of hope. I think it is fair to say that we’ve been living through difficult times and it may be especially challenging to see the way forward today. But I want to assure people there is still a way forward, there is still hope, and we can still leave a better world for both our kids and theirs.

I understand that without context, the weight of those words means pretty little. To clarify, I’m a two time suicide survivor, I had a difficult childhood and an even worse time navigating life as a young adult. I was failed by every system that was supposed to be designed to help me. I’ve experienced homelessness, I’ve lived on five pound bags of potatoes, and I’m transgender. I’m not a stranger to life being tough.

So, how do I maintain hope, given the weight of the world today? First and most importantly, we are still alive.

Maybe not in an hour, next week, or next year, but every day we are here matters. Every day we have agency in making the world something better. Today is never going to be forever and the struggles of today are not insurmountable problems. All of human history has been ebbs and flows of societies doing their best to manage and our duty today is to simply manage the best we can.

We don’t need to carry the weight of the future on our shoulders, we just need to carry the weight of tomorrow. Make it one more day forward. Take stock of the things that still give hope, even if it’s hard. I don’t mean find some blind optimism or forced positivity, I mean give respect to the things in one’s life that really center them. Often this is friends, family, or the parts of someone’s life they’re proud about.

Hope needs to be practiced, because it stops our brain from doom spiraling. It gives us resiliency against despair. And it centers us away from the kind of fear that sets us up to fail. When a person has centered their hope, when they can find tomorrow, the next thing is to find community.

Our world has gotten extremely partisan. We’ve gotten inflexible and intolerant towards each other in ways that do terrify me. When I think about and encourage community, I’m not thinking about a person’s chosen ingroup. I’m thinking about neighborhoods, schools and city hall. I think about getting invested in the places we live, to work towards and share public spaces like parks, to volunteer with local causes.

The way of the world or our national government is something none of us have much say in. We, however, have so much stake in our own communities. We can build them into places where we support each other. And when we do this, we can feel that much more connected, safe and hopeful for the future we built here for ourselves and our kids.

I get that the world hasn’t been fair to a lot of folks, myself included. When I suggest some effort for common charity and cause, often people sneer. Lots of us have lived our life with nobody helping us or sticking their neck out for us, so why should we? And the actual point of investing in a community that someone never felt invested in, is to take back a future that they were denied. It is to break the cycles we all hate and give a real chance to the kind of communities and connections we used to embrace.

I’m in my thirties. It’s a weird age where most kids think I’m ancient and most elders are thrilled to see someone else carrying the work forward into the next generation. What I can promise is that I will work on everything I’ve outlined here for my life. My work in suicide prevention is ultimately connecting people to hope, community, and a genuine belief the world can get better. And it isn’t despite everything I know that I have hope, it is because of what I know.

There are truly incredible people in our communities. Doctors, educators, parents, and volunteer advocates who fight tooth and nail for a better tomorrow. Not a few: hundreds. We have the capacity to sort out our struggles, to survive hardship and to see kids smile. We are not fundamentally that different as people, no matter a person’s politics or background.

If someone needs to survive right now, work on surviving. If someone is doing okay, look at who needs help. If anyone needs to know there are people who haven’t lost hope, who keep working towards the future, I will never give up.

Faye Seidler is a suicide prevention advocate who focuses on LGBTQ+ data and outcomes. Reach her at fayeseidlerconsulting.com.Harbor Health Initiative offers specialized resources for the LGBTQ+ community at harborhealthinitiative.org/. Call 988 to reach The Suicide And Crisis Lifelife.