hope against hope

i am currently watching what is easily the most depressing movie of all time. i have no idea why i'm even watching it. it's not even that great of a movie to be honest. the first time i watched it i felt like gouging out my eyeballs with those teeny little plastic coated baby spoons. and yet here i am, watching it again. maybe i'm a masochist.

scratch that maybe. i know exactly what i'm doing and i'm doing it very intentionally. i am challenging my hope. i've never been much of a competitor, i don't take dares [i think they're dumb] but i am incredibly stubborn and sometimes i go to great lengths to prove my point, even if i'm the only one i'm proving it to.

i am watching this movie to test my hope.

my last blog was not a particularly hopeful one. the point i made wasn't that single people should try to make valentine's day some kind of deluded sunshine&lollipops fest. my point was that valentine's day shouldn't suck any more [or less] than any other day.

and yet despite that evidence of unhope, somehow i am not a hopeless person. i have no idea why i'm not a hopeless person as i have every reason to be.

my hope is not a warm-fuzzy hope. it has nothing to do with naivety - i've heard those stories, i've lived those stories. it's certainly not a hope based on reality, or at least not physical reality. my hope has nothing to do with fairy tales, nothing to do with humanity, and it definitely has absolutely nothing to do with my own merits - real, perceived, or otherwise.

my hope isn't even as simple as faith. i know many people who have had enduring faith and yet have had their hopes dashed in very real and painful ways. i know many people with lots of faith and relatively little hope, if any at all.

i wish my hope was contagious but that doesn't always seem to be the case. probably because my particular breed of hope doesn't have the typical symptoms of hope; things like a sweet temperament, blind optimism, and the color pink - things i don't have and things i don't like. but my hope is resilient, i have no idea why. my hope is as stubborn as i am, and thank God for that. no seriously, thank God for that because as simplistic as it sounds, He's the only one that deserves any sort of credit.

i'm watching a hopeless movie to prove to myself that i still have hope. the good news is i do.