Hope / hōp / n. The first steps toward disappointment.
I was sitting in my weekly group therapy session (think: AA for injured athletes) and we were discussing the concept of hope. The coach asked for our initial reactions to this quote: “Challenges are inevitable, defeat is optional.” Without missing a beat, I said “Honestly, what a trite message.” The sentiment was immediately echoed by the other group members, making me feel like less of an ass.
The therapy session continued, doing the delicate dance of validating our frustrated, angry, depressed moods while attempting to provide tools to help alleviate pain (at least the self-induced pain). When we all said goodbye, I closed my laptop and checked Google Maps – 72 minutes to get home. Hard pass. So, I decided to spend the next 45 minutes or so contemplating my current (and seemingly antagonistic) relationship with hope. Therapists call this “doing the work.” I call it “self-flagellation for fun.”
I won’t bury the lead: I think I’ve conditioned myself to live on as little hope as possible. I’ve always said that I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist – I’m just a realist. Which sounds the same as when people say “I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat – I’m a centrist. I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” Again: trite.
During this journey that I lovingly call ‘perma-injured’, I have held one thing very close – my redemption arc: a bike ride across the United States. In my mind, an injury of this magnitude, with so much emotional distress, deserves a comeback that is equal in scale and accomplishment. 4,000 miles of riding feels like the perfect response to everything I’ve navigated since 2023. I knew that if everything went according to plan and I committed to my rehab, I would have the opportunity to take the entire upcoming summer off and go on a personal ride of redemption. And guess what I did… I allowed myself to hope. I have hoped and hoped for this ride during every second of this recovery. When at my lowest, I would imagine myself cruising on a quiet road in South Dakota. I would think about the audiobooks I would want to listen to. I would remind myself of the friends I would get to reconnect with along my route. That hope kept me afloat.
I found out this week that I will need to undergo yet another round of injections due to lingering complications from my last surgery. Upside? Maybe they work and I don’t have constant pain. Downside? It adds eight more weeks to my recovery timeline – rendering it all but impossible to have a successful ride this summer. Proverbial rock and hard place. And of all emotions I currently feel, there is one that rises to the top – regret. You’re an idiot for allowing yourself to hope for that trip, Alli. You should have known better.
If I’m being honest – and I should be, because this website was hard to build and costs me $2.95/month to maintain – there is a singular narrative that seems to be the origin of everything I struggle to transcend about myself: I’m not destined for bad things, but I’m not destined for good ones, either. I don’t think this stems from a lack of self-worth or a feeling that I am “undeserving” – if anything, I can be fairly entitled about wanting a full human experience. I think it comes down to the expectations I set for my life. I have learned (through many ups and subsequent downs) that it is so much easier to keep your emotions in a steady state of rest (e.g., indifference, apathy, melancholy) than it is to ride the emotional train up to the peak of excitement, only to vomit and regret getting on the ride when back at the disappointing bottom.
Depressing? Tell me about it – I’m figuring all of this out AND realizing I have to sit in rush hour traffic to get home to my sweats and slippers. But I need to figure out how to change this narrative. Good things can happen, but I do myself a huge disserve when I deny myself the ability to believe that they could happen to me.
Someone in the group session told us about a poem called “Hope is a Sewer Rat”, which is a poetic reply to Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers” – no offense to Emily, but her version feels (you guessed it): trite. I prefer the sewer rat. Messy. Unflattering. Determined. Hope isn’t comforting, always visible in the storm. Hope is a stubborn desire, stemming from difficult times and hardship, to see something beyond the present pain. I’ve put both poems below (in the event that you’re reading this to stall for time while rush hour traffic dies down).
Today, hope is a four-letter word (you know the one). Tomorrow, it’ll probably feel the same. But this process has pointed me toward something important – hope is vital to life. Shoving it down and forcing it to bury itself alive is unnatural. Unhealthy. And is likely the source of a lot of pain I’ve felt, both today and in years past. Choosing how to have hope will be one of the biggest lessons I take from this season in life. Attaching hope to an outcome, a thing, something binary (a bike ride across the country from June-September 2025) – it’ll either happen or it won’t – will always leave me sitting with my own confirmation bias. But hoping for good things – that someday I will ride my bike without pain, that these injections will bring me much needed relief, that we will eventually have a new president – these are all things that carry so much upside. I seem to be in my feels lately with poetry, so here’s one more (Patrick Overton, The Leaning Tree):
When you walk to the edge of all the light you have
And take that first step into the darkness of the unknown,
You must believe that one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid for you to stand upon,
Or, you will be taught how to fly.
I hope that I will be forever changed by this stupid, capable, broken, beautiful knee.
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