Hope can feel like a double-edged sword for me, bringing both joy and vulnerability to disappointment. In this episode, I reflect on the complex nature of hope, especially after experiencing personal and collective setbacks like the recent election results.

I share my own struggles with hope and the apprehension that often comes with it, drawing connections between significant life events and the smaller daily challenges I face.

As I navigate the tricky terrain of hope, I encourage you to embrace your emotions and remember that even in tough times, the human spirit can find a way to move forward.

Takeaways:

• I believe hope is a powerful emotion, but it often comes with the risk of disappointment.
• Experiencing hope can lead to great joy, but it can also bring deep despair.
• When I face disappointment, I know it’s important to acknowledge and process my feelings.
• Resilience is key; even in moments of deep despair, I can find a way forward.
• I recognize that love and hope can lead to profound sadness when things don’t go as expected.

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I'm Matt Gilhooly and this is the Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello my friends. Welcome to day six of my 30 day experiment.

So in 30 days I'm going to try to release 30 of these smaller bonus episodes where I address a prompt or a thought or question or anything.

So if you have any questions or thoughts or things that I should address in some of these or I should consider, I can't say that I'm going to, but that I should consider, please reach out to me on social media or you can send me an email@Matthew lifeshift podcast.com and I will take a look at that, add it to the list.

Usually this is just kind of a game time decision in which I look at the list, think about it for a half a second, and then answer the question in whatever comes out of my mouth.

And so hopefully you're learning a little bit about me and the way that I think and the things that I think about and the moments in my life that have shaped me. And if you're not, maybe you're just enjoying these little episodes or you're just here for the longer episodes.

And those are going to be coming out every Tuesday. So you'll be able to hear really amazing life shifting moments from my guests.

I've already recorded episodes through January, so not through all of January, through some of January. And I'm going to continue doing that. So thank you just for being along this ride with me.

So today is the day after the election day here in the United States and a lot of people woke up this morning and the person that they voted for did not win.

So what I wanted to talk about today because it's heavy on my mind in the circles that I run in and the people that I talk to and the people that I am closest to, including my family and obviously my close friends, is I want to talk about the tricky part of hope, which sounds kind of weird. And it's really just based on my own experiences and something that I was thinking about this morning, of how great hope is and how good it feels.

Yet the older that I get, the more I have this apprehension of hope because I know how hard it is when something that you hope for does not play out in the way that you were hoping. And therefore everything gets crushed and it feels very numbing or devastating or like, how do I move forward? How do I feel positive again?

How do I think about things in not a negative light? And so hope is just like it's so powerful, but it has that other side.

And maybe it is something like being able to feel immense joy or immense love is that you are risking the chance that if things don't quite continue on that path, then everything on the other side feels so devastating and so empty. And so I've had so many of these experiences in my life and every time I get really apprehensive about having hope.

And, you know, you get this hope and then you're like, wait, no, don't do that. Just set yourself up for something of the reality and don't let yourself get too far down the road.

I don't know if you've ever done this in like maybe a job interview. You're going for a job, you really want that job, you think it's the perfect fit, you've done all that you can.

And then you're like, I don't want to get too excited about it because what if I don't get it? What if I get that rejection letter?

Even though everything seemed like it was perfect, the interviews went great, all the people were really awesome to talk to, and you just had a great time in the whole experience. So you're like, yes.

And then you start picturing what life is like when you have that job and you start picturing what your day to day will be like at work and the projects that you will work on and all the things that come along with it. And then you get the letter that says, sorry, we chose someone else.

And it's really devastating because you've already started building up this dream, these. These hopes and aspirations of what you want to do moving forward. And I can't tell you how many times I did that. Or like, you know, you.

You hope a certain situation will work out so that you can move to a new place or you can get access to something that you didn't have before because you know you're going up for an award and you think you have a shot, but you don't want to get too excited about it because what if you lose? What if you lose?

And just the other day I was thinking, or I was saying, I think to everyone is, I have more connection with people in the valleys of their lives. And.

And it's because I think every time our hope gets crushed a little bit, we fall and then we sit in it and we absorb it and we recognize it and if we're lucky, we are okay with it and we acknowledge the fact that we are just human and things suck sometimes and things are great sometimes and There's a whole lot of things in between. There can be really bad moments, and there can be really great moments.

But once we're done acknowledging how we're feeling and we let ourselves feel that for however long we need to, we eventually start crawling out. We start crawling towards whatever this new normal is going to look like, despite whatever we were hoping would happen.

And then we start to walk, and then we're running again. And then we kind of almost forget how we felt in that deep despair. And as I say, we. I'm really just talking from my own experience.

There have been so many times where I felt like, crap. Like, things like, how do I take another step? How do I go on to another day? In fact, over the summer, when Mikey was dying. Mikey's my dog.

When he was getting sicker and sicker, and I was like this. He's not good.

But maybe I'm imagining that maybe he's gonna live for another couple years, and we're just gonna have to do these things to kind of make his life a little bit easier. And I was kind of building up this hope, and my love was growing for him. And it got really scary because I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

And then I had to make the decision. And then we went through the motions of. Of having lap of love come to our house and take care of Mikey in his last moments and doing those things.

The next morning when I woke up and I was taking care of Molly, the other dog, she was doing her normal things, and I had to do normal things with her, and it broke my heart.

And so this is where I'm comparing this hope and then the devastation to this immense thing of love, and then the devastation that comes after it because you loved so much. That next day after Mikey died, I thought, like, I wasn't going to be able to function as a normal human ever again.

Like, for that whole day, I just felt broken, destroyed. Like, how am I going to walk down the hallway without crying?

How am I going to just function despite the fact that for 43 years, I've gone through all sorts of ups and downs, right? Like, my mom died, and then I had to go through that. My grandmother died. I had to go through that.

All the things that came in between, lost jobs, whatever it may be, lost friendships, lost relationships, whatever those things were, I made it through somehow. But I always remember that devastation right after.

And it always makes me think, don't ever hope again, or don't ever love again, or don't Ever have too much joy again because you know how tough this side is. So I guess I'm just really rambling right now, and I apologize.

There's really no point to this beyond the fact that it's normal, I think, to be a little apprehensive about these bigger emotions like hope and love and joy, and opening ourselves up to those allows for deep despair, deep hurt, deep sadness, deep depression. But if we're lucky, I think we all have the capacity to move through it, move with it. It might not be right away. It might take a little bit of time.

We might have to do one step in front of the other for a little bit, and then hopefully we're able to look back and go, oh, I barely remember who I was in that moment when everything felt so tough. So I think the human spirit is really resilient. And I know for myself included, not all the time do I remember that.

So I guess if you take nothing else from this ramble that I just did for day six, think deep and think about how you have been resilient through other things in your life. If you're feeling a deep despair in any moment in your life, it doesn't have to be about the election.

It can be about whatever, like you just lost a dog or like I, you know, like whatever it may be, think about those moments and. And what the path afterwards look like. Because those really hard moments, usually they don't last a long time.

There might be a season of them, but somehow our human spirit continues on. We push through. And I'll leave you with this.

If you need anything or you need to chat or you want to talk about something, please reach out to me through social media. Go on Instagram, the Life Shift podcast. You'll be able to find me. Some of you have my personal Instagram reach out there. Whatever works for you.

I am here to listen. I don't have all the answers. I only have my answers and what works for me. And I'm happy to share how I feel about certain things. So please reach out.

Reach out to your community, reach out to the people around. You know that eventually we'll be crawling again. We'll be walking again, we'll be running again. And this will just be a moment in the past.

So that is day six for you. Did not know what I was going to talk about, and I still don't know what I talked about. So hopefully something came out of this episode.

But I will be back for day seven tomorrow. I just found out I'm not traveling for work. Next week, so I'm going to be able to keep this up until November 30th.