avatarMark Starmach

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Thoughts For The Dark: How People Find Hope

I spent a year collecting people’s go-to thoughts that help them in hard times. Here’s what I’ve learned.

We’ve all been to the dark before.

The dark is that place in our minds where our worries loom large, where our anxieties are all-consuming, and where our sadness is enormous. Combined, they block out all the light in life.

It’s a place we can fall into during times of stress, despair, change, trauma, or perhaps most frustratingly, via no trigger at all — and we can be stuck there for days, weeks, months, or years.

The dark is more than a passing mood — it’s a mood you can’t see out of.

And yet, somehow, by some minor miracle, we do.

We find a small light that gives us hope that it won’t just be darkness forever.

And then that small light, becomes a bigger light, and a bigger light, and pretty soon we’re back in the sunshine of our minds.

But how?

Is it by chance, or is there a reliable source of hope we can tap in to?

How can we more reliably light up the dark?

As someone with anxiety and who has experienced bouts of depression, I’m existentially curious about how we find hope in the dark parts of our minds.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that, over time and among other things, I’ve developed certain go-to thoughts that reliably provide a little light — small epiphanies summed up in to pithy sayings like “the water will always be cold”, a metaphor derived from a time I swam every day to pull myself out of a depression that reminds me that things will always be terrifying at first, but soon your body will warm and adapt to the cold.

Another thought, “we will cross that bridge when we come to it”, is a simple saying but stoic reminder that I can’t worry about every eventuality before it eventuates. You have to deal with things consecutively, not comprehensively.

Or most recently, that “nostalgia is a toxin”, something that feels alluring and good, but ultimately lessens the experience of the present, in that it presents a Disneyland depiction of my past, and paints my current situation in a worser light. That by continuously looking backwards, it’s hard to ever feel like I’m moving forwards.

In times of dark, these ideas are a warm blanket I can reach for. I began to wonder if other people had a similar armoury of thoughts that helped light moments or periods of dark. And after talking with friends and colleagues, I found that yes, they did. Their thoughts were an eclectic mix of sage reminders, ancient and gnomic wisdom, quotes from books and TV shows, idiosyncratic mantras, and other powerful cognitive motley. And so about a year ago, I embarked on a small project called ‘Thoughts For The Dark’ in an attempt to collect these small but powerful ideas.

My aim was to get many thoughts from many people and turn them into a public resource. To build a sort of living, breathing repository of human hope. But also, to better understand how people cope with things like anxiety, depression — where they get their hope from.

I got hundreds of responses and stories from people doing all sorts of things. Some are artists and other writers. Some are cancer survivors, parents, journalists, and grandparents. What slowly emerged was a fascinating geography of optimism — a colourful landscape of bright notions, not just blindly optimistic, but battle-wearied, trialled-and-tested from the front lines of human suffering. I’ve found them surprising, inventive, enriching and encouraging, and have been able to draw certain conclusions from these thoughts about the nature of hope itself.

And so if you find yourself in the dark, or know someone who might be, I want to share with you now some of this lightness I’ve discovered. I hope it provides you with a little bit of hope as it has for me.

“The ocean eventually carves the rock” — Alice

Alice describes herself as an anxious human, always trying to find ways to cope. A few years ago she lived by the ocean. She used to walk on the coastline, and loved spending time looking at the waves crashing on the rocks. At the time, she was feeling anxious and helpless. She was looking for a job, and had a hard time dealing with rejections. One day she was on the bus, looking at the ocean again. She observed the shapes of the rocks and could see the impact of the water on them. She thought about the rhythm of the waves. The waves kept crashing on the rocks, over and over again. And because they would never stop they would end up shaping the rocks. She took that thought with her, and applied it to her own situation — thinking that if she kept applying and reaching out to people, it would eventually pay off. In Alice’s words:

“I try to imagine that I am the ocean and that even if it doesn’t feel like it, what I do today will lead me to the place I’m trying to reach. It helps me be patient and perseverant.”

“Could we just be out of Vegemite?” — Mother of four

This mother and advertiser, who wishes to remain anonymous, sees herself as her own harshest critic. Like many of us, she beats herself up and overthinks things that likely aren’t even an issue through the eyes of someone else. However, she recalls one particular instance involving a jar of Vegemite that marked a turning point and has helped her be kinder to herself…

“One day, my husband commented that we were out of Vegemite, and I took it as a full-blown attack, saying that I wasn’t on top of the house and kids and work and that generally I was failing at life. All he was thinking about was — should he have peanut butter or honey instead? Since then, I’ve become more mindful of the story I’m telling myself. Is it the whole story? Or just one distorted spin on it?”

“Happy, Healthy, Hundred” — Michael

Michael was diagnosed with Melanoma at age 25. After receiving immunotherapy treatment, he spent hours upon hours, laying flat on a CT imaging machine for progress scans. This thought came to Michael during one of those early scans, and he’s been repeating it at every scan since.

“This is my mantra, envisioning the kind of life I want to live. Being happy, being healthy, and living to 100.”

Thankfully, the cancer has not reappeared. Michael is now a father of two.

“You won’t feel like this forever” — Celia

Celia is a new mum with old anxiety and insomnia issues. In the depths of post-natal anxiety and insomnia, this was something that several of her friends (especially other mums) repeated to her. She’d ask — ‘when will this end?’. They’d say — ‘I don’t know, but the one thing I can promise you is that it will.’ No feeling is final. No feeling is forever. As Celia says:

“Change is the one thing you can rely on. It’s both physically and metaphysically impossible for things to remain static. So while when you’re in the depths of a black hole feeling hopeless about how you’ll get out, you can seek comfort in the fact that this moment — like everything — is temporary, and there WILL be an end to it. Even if you can’t see it right now.”

“Nothing good happens after 10pm” — Zoe

Like Celia, Zoe often finds herself overthinking things, especially late at night. She borrowed this thought from an episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ — a show which she acknowledges “didn’t age well”. However, there is an episode where they say “Nothing good happens after 2am”, and speaking in terms of social events and happenings that is definitely true. But, when it comes to internalising stress and getting caught up in your thoughts, Zoe thinks the deadline for that is 10pm…

“I say this to myself as a reminder that it is very easy to spiral in your own thoughts when it’s late at night and you’re tired, probably dehydrated and most likely have eaten a lot of sugar. It’s so easy to think bad things about yourself and get upset. But then I remind myself that I would not be thinking that way in the morning and everything is fresher.”

Dismiss the nocturnal nasties — they can’t be trusted as purveyors of truth.

“Everyone is winging it” — Jade

Jade is a creative, a husband to a wife who is “way stronger than he is”, and a father to two daughters who are “far more intelligent and beautiful than he will ever be”. (He is also very humble). He says this thought isn’t new, that like most things it’s appropriated, but that it became particularly personal to him one day when he was having a beer with his dad.

“He turned to me at the age of 60+ and said, “You know my boy…To this day, inside I still feel like 18 year old me trying to figure the world out.” It was a realisation that no one wants to ever appear as if they’re not in control.”

“What was, was. What is now, is now.” — Anonymous

This contributor heard this from an elderly Kyrgyzstani woman. It’s an old Russian proverb. She was reflecting on her time in the Soviet Union, which was unusually prosperous, and her sudden and subsequent poverty once the Union fell.

“It’s a way of coming to grips with terrible misfortune, the ups and downs of fate, and the world’s indifference. It’s a stoic reminder that, despite all that, I am here.”

“It isn’t what it is” — Cliff

For years, Cliff (whose name has been changed for privacy) would tell himself “It is what it is.” As a creative director and illustrator, he would say this to help him accept the pressure that comes from working in a world-class environment, the expectations for awards, the bad pay and poor treatment. As anxiety and depression crept in he would push them down and “suck it up.” He notes that “Each night in bed after hours of mind chatter, trying to justify the harrowing culture or bad behaviour, at the point of exhaustion, I’d pull myself together by saying ‘it is what it is’.” He says that this made sense of his anxiety, but also anchored him in a pattern for years.

“After a few incredibly brutal months I was pushed to my mental health limits, on the edge in all sorts of ways. In my midnight angst and terror telling myself “it is what it is, it is what it is” something changed, one word changed. ‘It isn’t what it is’, what ‘it is’ is destructive and damaging, what ‘it is’ is killing you, what ‘it is’, the salary, the awards, it’s not worth anywhere as much as I am. I’VE NEVER GONE BACK.”

“Yeah, but, you would say that.” — Anonymous

This contributor often gets that anxious voice inside their head that imagines the worst possible future from the tiniest whiff of woe. They gleaned this thought from a Louis Theroux documentary in which Louis is being grilled by a religious extremist. When told the Bible says he’ll go to Hell, Louis calmly retorts, “Yeah, but the Bible would say that.”

“Applied elsewhere, I find this to be a helpful retort to my own inner-critic, the voice of anxiety. It says I’ll fail. It says I’ll be like this forever. It says I’ll go to Hell. But then I think, “Yes, but you would say that. That’s what anxiety does. It’s almost predictable.” I find this takes the power away from it.”

“Let’s win today” — Jake

Jake works in a demanding job and sometimes feels overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work to do in a day. Solace comes from reminding himself that, for the most part, processes are linear — that if you don’t do “this” then you can’t do “that”.

“When lots of problems are thrown at me, I try to snap into that mode: “What can we do right now to win in this moment? To make tomorrow, or next week, or next month, easier?””

He explains that in his personal life, this idea has helped him when lots of things are demanding his attention. The answer isn’t to answer them all at once — he asks, “What can I do right now, in this very moment, to feel better?”

“Depression is a call to action” — Margaret

Margaret says she heard this on a podcast once when she was going through a difficult period of her life. As she beautifully says:

“When we’re depressed, our body is telling us that something isn’t right, that we’re not happy. The answer isn’t always found in ignoring it, but hearing, what is wrong? What can I do differently? What can I change? It isn’t a call to end your life, it’s a call to live your life differently.”

There are so many I haven’t been able to touch on, like “You’re not the best”, a clever piece of reverse-psychology that removes the pressure to be ‘the best’ in your chosen field, or a flip on an old adage “What if the best case happens?”, or quite poetically, “It’s shit now, and it’s probably going to be shit for a while, but I can promise that it will be less shit, one day.

What has struck me about all these thoughts for the dark is the irregularity of the sources they come from. Be it a jar of Vegemite, the ocean, old proverbs, a father, Louis Theroux or ‘How I Met Your Mother’— perhaps the most hopeful thing about hope is that it can come to you in any old funny way, from any old funny thing. That if you are open to it, you don’t have to find it — it finds you.

There is something important here to note about the psychological anatomy of hope. The part of our brains that gets consumed by dark feels all-consuming, but, just outside our focus, there is an equal and opposite hemisphere that hoards the light and parses it out, at first cryptically and slowly, one piece at a time, then more obviously, more quickly. This is perhaps most soberly summed up by one contributor who notes:

“If I haven’t killed myself yet, there must be some part of me that wants to stay alive”

Our minds are capable of imagining an infinity of bad futures, but equally and importantly, they are also capable of imagining an infinity of brighter ones. That’s the dangerous beauty of our imaginations. By knowing this, we can more readily trust our minds’ ability to help us, to be inventive and creative and MacGyver-esque when the darkness rolls in — and light a little candle inside us.

What’s your thought for the dark?

Mental Health
Psychology
Life Lessons
Depression
Anxiety
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