Birthday Cheers to the Worst Year Ever or A Case for Hope

Oh, and happy birthday to me. I’m looking forward to my new year. I have a feeling it’s gonna be a good one.

That line is an excerpt from my birthday blog last year. I’d just built a new website to showcase my writing. I imagined perhaps starting a freelancing gig and later converted it to my digital Teaching Portfolio. I was a professional writer and professor on the job market. As the song goes, I had that ambition, baby.

Sigh. That “trip around the moon” I encountered some rough terrain. For real, I think I literally cringed when reading that blog post again just now, because a year later, I’m arguably worse off than I was then. The job market grabbed me by the PhD and flopped me around like Loki vs. the Hulk. As a result, I’m set to leave the university where I’ve been teaching for two years and was deeply undervalued. This is all with zero prospects for employment on the horizon. Throw in the mix disillusionment by a lifetime of loyalty to religious church structures and institutions. Then we ice that cake with a global pandemic. Happy birthday to me indeed.

This is clearly not what I wished for when I blew out the candles.

And yet, in all that, here I am. Every morning I wake up, step outside, and take in the warmth of the sun. I enjoy these nonsensical conversations with my five-year-old (who thinks she has the answers to most modern dilemmas), and she can make me laugh. Although I know this precious time is coming to an end, I teach my students who, even in a crisis, are resilient and innovative. There’s still a spark to each new day just before I start to think too much.

Even with everything weighing on me, the moments of lightness are still in abundance. And that gives me hope. Hope for what? I have no clue. Perhaps that the next day can still contain all the same goodness and maybe more? Point is, I have just enough to go from day-to-day, but apparently, that’s all you really need.

When hope becomes a long-game, then you have faith… and faith is the evidence, my friends. The fact that you can still get up and live says, something is in it for you and, if not you, then for others. Faith doesn’t anticipate a reason for existence is coming down the pike. It is the reason, and it’s already here.

I have nothing circumstantially concrete that says this will be a good year. If we go by the past, 2019 into 2020 built a strong case against it. Depression and anxiety are natural responses. Yet, I have faith, which is made up of tiny specks of hope that carry me from one day to the next. I can live with that. Can you?

~Jennifer.