Someone worth hoping for

Hope.  My arch nemesis.  We meet again.  All too often you have gotten the better of me, but now I think I’ve done it.  I have finally figured you out.

For years hope has lifted me up only to crush me in unimaginable ways.  It was this misguided mistress leading me down a path of ruin, while I blindly followed behind faithfully, favoring some sort of happy ending.  I blamed all my sorrows on hope, feigning that hope was wasted on the hopeless.  Well no more.  This week shall go down in history because I have finally learned that hope is not my enemy, hope is my friend.

The philosophy that happiness is not a set of circumstances, but rather a choice, isn’t a new concept.  My circumstance are what they are, I want someone I can’t have.  Its an age old tale in the book of Noelle.  Once again, am I going to make these unrelenting and unchangeable set of circumstances my prison? Or turn them into a palace?

If all these years of heartache have given me anything, it is an exuberant amount of will power and tenacity. I can be happy, I will be happy, and no one will stop me.  I’ve gotten really good at finding ways to stay positive and remain optimistic in the face of rejection.  I’m proud to say that I’ve transformed a lot of my prison cells.  Yet the biggest hurdle has always been hope.  

Its usually right around the time that I think I’ve gained control of the situation.  Its the instant when I finally think I’m strong enough to move on.  That is the precise moment when a glimmer of hope drifts into the darkest corner of my mind and has me believing, “hey, I don’t need to redecorate this prison cell, I can actually get out of this one and get what I want for a change.”  Next thing we know I’m back at square one.  I’m dreaming of him, wondering what I should say to him when I find the courage to text him, and planning our miraculous reconciliation.  Its a dangerous spiral towards a pit of anguish and despair.

I have decided to bring hope back from the dark side, because here in the light hope is going to help me out big time.  You ready for what Noelle learned this week?  Here it is.  I learned that the reason hope has bitten me in the ass so many times before is because I spent a lot of time hoping for the wrong things.  I would run into him at the unlikeliest of places and hail it as a sign from the heavens that we were meant to be together.  A week would be spent hoping that he would come to the same holy realization as me and come running back to me.  I would receive an unexpected text message to see how I was doing and I’m suddenly hurled back into the belief that he cares, he still cares, my lordy he still cares!  I love the quote that when hope is hungry, anything will feed it.  Small gestures are magnified and coincidences are labeled as fate.

But today is a new day, here in this day I will not hope for him to come back.  Hoping for him to come back to me will only result in heartache, disappointment, and alas even more rejection, because it just isn’t going to happen, no matter how much I hope for it to.  It would make about as much sense as hoping to win the lottery and dreaming of all the things you’ll buy with the money, when you don’t even have a lotto ticket.  Instead, I need to hope not for his return, but for his replacement.  Someone new, someone better, and someone who deserves my love is a much more realistic hope that I can hold onto.  It is a hope that can pull me out of this.  No longer will all this hope I have inside me be wasted on the wrong person. Hope is on my side now, hope is my friend, and she’s gonna help me find someone worth hoping for.