The Things We Cling To: An Introduction to There Is Hope in this World

This series was conceived shortly after my first child was. I was pregnant, and I was struggling with the idea of bringing a child into a world that can be so cruel and so ugly.

My child. I worried that my own views on life would be detrimental to raising to a happy and hopeful human.

So I began to “collect” all of the little things that make life worth it. Friendships…both loud ones and the calmest quiet ones, coffee outside on a sunny but cold day, the smell of grass, the sound that dead leaves make under foot, a wobbly bounding puppy, a stranger holding the door for you from so far ahead that you have to jog a little to not make their kindness wait too long. I wanted to acknowledge them and remember them for myself, and to display them as proof to my children, and anyone else who might lose

Hope had been a fickle thing in my life. I struggled with both alcoholism and post traumatic stress disorder and fought for years to find any hope at all. I lived without it, and without it, I almost died in 2012. A suicide attempt left me with a failed liver and in a coma. I still remember the exact moment that I found that smallest spark of hope and clung to it. I held it close to me until I could find more little moments, tiny lights to add to it so it wouldn’t disappear. I still do today. I collect small (and large) moments of joy, of connection…of humanity in this world and I cling to them because I am afraid of losing all hope again.

This series has just begun, really. What you see here is the beginning… Volume One. I am raising money to print a book soon, but the series will likely continue as long as I do.

Hope isn’t a blind idealism; it isn’t burying your head in the sand to the tragedies around you. Hope is looking intently and ceaselessly at the despair and struggling every moment against it. Hope can’t exist without the knowledge of what we are fighting against. And it can’t exist without the recognition of all of those things we are fighting for.

[original introduction from 2016]