Hope Isn’t About Feeling Better

A practice for staying with what’s real; and still choosing to move forward

It’s tempting, re-opening my business after maternity leave, to paint a rosy picture—one of perfect harmony and bliss in my little new family life.

And that would be a lie.

It would be an attempt to sell myself to you so that you trust me as a relationship coach, rather than share what feels real, honest, and deeply human about my current experience.

Since becoming a mother, alongside the never-ending love that keeps growing for my incredibly sweet little boy Oscar, and my deep gratitude for the chance to spend every day with him, after he experienced a life threatening birth, I’ve also scrapped against the ragged edges of deep sorrow, anger, pain, and guilt.

My relationship with my partner and our financial situation have, at times, fallen apart in ways I believed were behind me. Some days, it feels like we’re holding on by very thin threads, after trust has been broken and pain passed between us in so many ways.

There have been days when just waking up, feeding my son, getting outside for ten minutes, and returning to a house full of laundry, dirty dishes, mounting bills, and a relationship with its face-down on the floor, that’s been a day worth celebrating….

We ate, we slept a bit, we survived. That counts.

And yet…whilst everything seems to be falling apart..

More and more, I’m finding myself waking up with hope, joy and trust, reaching into a deeper inner well of resourcefulness and resilience than I ever knew was possible.

Because my son is a huge motivator. Because I want to trust life again, and make it work for our little family.

Because I can feel the bond we share, and I know how vital my own emotional stability is for his sense of safety in the world.

So I’ve been focusing on hope, not blind hope, but something more intentional. Something I like to call  Active Hope, a term coined by the wonderful Joanna Macy in her work on resilience and transformation in the face of crisis.

It’s the kind of hope that lives in small, grounded acts. That doesn’t require certainty. That moves stickiness without denying what’s hurts.

I’ve been using simple visualisations and small, doable steps to create real change where I’ve felt most overwhelmed or unclear.

It’s not linear. It’s definitely not tidy. But here’s what it looks like for me:

• Letting myself really feel the ouch.. grief, anger, fear. Giving space to the sticky emotions and letting them move through expression. (This time, I’m letting it all hang out very imperfectly)

• Reconnecting with vision: what do I actually want to happen here? What does it look and feel like?

• Taking one small, doable step toward that.

• And celebrating the shift, however tiny, as soon as it shows up. Letting that future vision start to feel real now.

  
  

This is what’s been moving me forward. A kind of active hope: not pretending everything is fine, but believing in life’s possibility while staying with the discomfort.

Letting the challenge teach me what matters most.

And I’ve noticed: when I take one step, the next one becomes clearer and trusting in the future is just what happens without trying to get there.

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The term “Active Hope” comes from the work of Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, particularly their book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Power. It’s a powerful resource for anyone navigating personal or collective crisis.