Borrowing Belief When You Cannot Find Your Own
When I cannot reach my own hope, I am allowed to lean on someone else's belief in me.
Will there be days when you cannot find hope inside yourself? Yes. You are too tired, too depleted, too sore. In those days, you do not have to manufacture hope out of nothing. You are allowed to borrow it.
Borrowed hope is leaning, for a little while, on the belief that someone else holds in you. When you cannot believe in your own future, you can rest in their quiet certainty that you will make it. When you cannot see your own strength, you can trust their witness that it is there. This is not weakness. This is what people are for. This is what community is for. To hold what you cannot hold yet, until you can hold it again.
A kind therapist has seen many people come through what you are walking through. They know it is possible, even when you cannot feel it. A trusted friend can see your strength when you cannot find it. Someone further along the road can tell you, from their own life, that the dark really does lift, even when the lifting is slow. These witnesses are not pretending. They are seeing something true that you cannot see from where you stand.
If there is no one in your life right now who can hold hope for you, you can borrow it from the quiet voices of people who have walked this road before — in stories, in writing, in this book. You can borrow it from people who once felt exactly the way you feel now, who are now living quieter, kinder lives. Their healing is honest proof that yours is possible, even when you cannot feel it yet.
If your hope has run out, that does not mean your healing has. Many people describe long stretches when they could not feel hope and could only keep moving. They describe, later, realizing — sometimes with a quiet kind of awe — that the moving itself was the healing. You do not have to feel hopeful to be healing.
When you cannot believe it, borrow belief. When you cannot see it, trust that others can see it for you. When you cannot hold the hope, let someone hold it for you until you are ready to take it back. You will not need to borrow forever. But for today, leaning is allowed. When your own light is low, another shore's light will hold the dark back for you. The light is shared. That is what shores do for each other.