While I Breathe
Rebuilding Hope When It's Let You Down
I remember the exact moment I knew I had to leave. Not the fight, not the broken promise, the moment after. Standing in my kitchen, recognizing with a clarity that felt almost violent that my hope, my love, ten years of both, could not make my husband sober. Only he could do that.
I had spent a decade believing otherwise. Believing that if I loved hard enough, stayed steady enough, hoped long enough, he would find his way to sober on the other side of my devotion. That's what a decade of hoping does; it convinces you the hoping itself is the work, that if you just do it correctly, for long enough, you'll earn the outcome. I didn't understand yet that hope was never mine to spend on someone else's choice.
In that instant, everything I had built in my head was gone. Not slowly. Not in stages. All of it, at once. The house we'd grow old in. The children who didn't exist yet but somehow already had faces. The holiday table that would eventually need two extra leaves to fit everyone we'd add to our small family over the years. I had been building toward an entire life. And all of it was gone in the time it took me to say the hard part out loud: I cannot make you sober. I have to leave.
That was the deepest despair I had ever known.
When You Can't Afford to Dream
For a long time after, I wasn't living. I was existing. I showered because I had a job. I had a job because I needed to eat and pay bills. One foot in front of the other, robotically. I don't actually remember much of that season of my life; I've since learned that's the brain protecting itself, not a failure of memory. It wasn't weakness. It was survival doing exactly what survival is built to do: keep the body moving and spare the mind the rest.
I had survived hard things before my marriage. A sexual assault as a preteen. A neurodivergent diagnosis that finally explained why I felt like I was doing life wrong. A domestic violence relationship in college. A layoff that gutted my sense of stability. I genuinely believed the hardest parts of my life were behind me, that I had paid whatever toll gets paid and earned my way to easier. Watching my marriage dissolve nearly broke what was left; it shot me straight back to my 20-year-old self questioning her own worth, her own right to exist. All those years of healing, and one more collapse was enough to make me doubt whether any of it had stuck.
If you're reading this and some part of it sounds familiar, I want to say it plainly: when you are in survival mode, you cannot dream. Someone once said it to me this way, and I've never forgotten it. A dream is just hope pointed at the future. When hope has betrayed you, even the smallest dream can feel dangerous, because dreaming means caring about an outcome again, and caring means you can lose it again.
Borrowed Hope
Here's what nobody tells you about hope: it isn't a feeling that arrives. It's something you build, on purpose, the same way you'd rebuild anything that's been through a fire.
Researchers who study hope describe it less as wishful thinking and more as a skill made of two working parts: believing a goal is reachable and being able to name an actual path toward it. In one hope-based therapy study, participants wrote down a goal and then generated several possible routes to get there. Eight weeks later, they reported more meaning in their lives, more self-esteem, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. Hope, in other words, responds to practice. It is not a mood you're waiting to feel lucky enough to have.
I found my way back to hope through my family, in the truest sense of the word. Digging into the Sharp family history, I found our motto, one that has apparently followed us across an ocean and a few centuries: dum spiro spero. While I breathe, I hope. My ancestors survived the Scottish Highlands, a crossing of the Atlantic, and a hard settling into the Appalachian Mountains. If that was survivable, I told myself, so was this. That motto became a place to stand when I had nothing else to stand on.
And I wasn't standing there alone. My family and friends didn't wait for me to ask; they showed up, and they showed up specifically, in ways that met me where I was, instead of where they wished I could be. Some days that meant an invitation to share a meal, enjoy a concert, trivia night at the local dive bar, something to prove the world still had places I could walk into. Other days it meant someone sitting quietly with me at home when I couldn't leave it, not filling the silence, just refusing to let me sit in it by myself. Neither one asked more of me than I had to give that day.
Slowly, without announcing it, they moved me from existing back toward living. One day I laughed, actually laughed, and it startled me. Another day I went a few hours without crying, and I noticed it the way you notice the first warm day after a long winter. Eventually I found the courage to take a road trip by myself, then an afternoon at a museum, then a movie, and the toughest one of all eating out alone. Each experience gave me proof that I could still walk into spaces without someone bracing me on the way in.
Research on resilience backs up what my family and friends were doing instinctively: the availability of social support, emotional, practical, even just someone helping you think differently about your situation, is one of the clearest predictors of whether someone recovers from hardship and moves forward. We like to believe resilience is something we generate alone, by force of will, the bootstraps version of healing. It isn't. It's something other people help carry until we're strong enough to carry it ourselves. Within a few years, I wasn't just surviving anymore. I was living my life, my way.
If you want the fuller story of that marriage and what it taught me, I've written about it in When Love Isn't Enough.
Three Things That Rebuild Hope
Looking back now, I can see it wasn't a single breakthrough that got me from hopeless to hopeful again. There was no lightning bolt moment, no morning I woke up decided. It was a repeatable process, one I still lean on whenever hope goes quiet on me again, which it still does sometimes.
Let survival be the floor, not the failure. Existing isn't nothing. I used to be embarrassed by that season, the showering-because-you-have-to season, as though merely getting through the day was proof I wasn't trying hard enough to heal. I don't see it that way anymore. Survival is the floor you build the rest of your life on top of; you cannot skip it to get to living, and you shouldn't be ashamed you needed it.
Borrow hope until you can generate your own. You don't have to manufacture hope from nothing, especially not on the days it feels furthest away. A family motto passed down for centuries. A friend who shows up uninvited with takeout and doesn't ask you to talk. You can stand on someone else's hope, someone else's belief that things get better, until yours has enough strength to hold you again. That's not weakness. That's how hope is designed to work; it was never meant to be a solo act.
Take one small, scared action on purpose, every day. This is what I call MicrobraveryTM; it is the part I talk about most, because it's the part that actually moves you. Not the leap. The small, scared act. Saying yes to the invitation you'd normally decline. Walking into the room alone. Dancing badly in front of strangers. Each one is small enough to survive and honest enough to count, and none of them require you to feel brave first; you take the action, and the courage catches up after.
That third step is where grounded optimism actually lives: rooted in reality, open to possibility. Hope for the best, expect the truth of where you are right now. It's not a mindset you adopt once and keep forever. It's a muscle, and muscles only build with repetition, which means some days you'll do the rep and feel nothing, and you do it again anyway.
Dancing the Night Away
A few weeks ago I said yes to something that scared me: a night out at Tipitina's, my neighborhood music spot in New Orleans, listening to a Cajun band, being pulled onto the dance floor. I don't know how to dance to Cajun music. Nobody taught me the steps, and there's a rhythm to it that isn't intuitive if you didn't grow up with it in your body. My first time around the floor, I was painfully self-conscious, certain I was a full beat behind everyone else, certain that everyone could see it.
Then something shifted. I let go of the what-ifs – what if I mess up the steps, what if I'm off-beat, what will people think, and I just danced. I looked around, mid-turn, and realized almost no one was watching me at all. Everyone was consumed with their own steps, their own partner, their own night. The world doesn't revolve around us quite the way the voice in our head insists it does; we spend so much energy managing an audience that was never really watching. And when I finally told that voice to quite frankly shut up, something good happened. My feet stopped worrying about being right and just started moving.
That's what grounded optimism feels like from the inside. Not certainty. Not the absence of fear. Just enough hope, built one small, brave act at a time, to let go and dance anyway, badly, joyfully, in front of people who don't care and were never going to.
If you're in your season of existing right now, I don't need you to believe joy is coming back. Not yet. I just need you to believe the floor beneath you, however small, is enough to build on. You don't have to trust hope fully to start borrowing a little of someone else's. You don't have to feel brave to take one small, scared step today.
I can’t stop thinking about that dance floor now, not because it fixed anything, but because it proved something I needed proof of: that I am capable of letting go. That the woman standing in her kitchen years earlier, watching an entire imagined life disappear, could still end up somewhere unplanned and good, moving to music she didn't know the steps to, surrounded by strangers, unafraid. Hope didn't come back all at once. It came back the way most true things do, quietly, in pieces, built by hand.
You are not broken. You are not alone. And while you breathe, you hope.
