Faith, Hope & Love

You know how when you were a little kid and you believed in fairy tales? That fantasy of what your life would be? White dress, Prince Charming who’d carry you away to a castle on a hill... You’d lie in bed at night, and close your eyes, and you had complete and utter faith. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Prince Charming… they were so close you could taste them. But eventually you grow up. One day you open your eyes and the fairy tale disappears. Most people turn to the things and people they can trust. But the thing is? It’s hard to let go of that fairy tale entirely because almost everyone still has that smallest bit of hope, of faith, that one day they’ll open their eyes and it will all come true. - Meredith, Grey's Anatomy

Sometimes I feel like I’m losing hope. And faith. I’m pretty sure that fairy tales are a cruel joke played on us as children that we cling to as adults. When I hear my four-year-old niece talk about Prince Charming, I want to tell her to let go of that now, save herself some heartache later. But maybe that "smallest bit of hope" in me keeps me from dashing her own big dreams.

I have a ring that I wear on my left hand – and almost never take off, except to sleep – that says “Faith, Hope, Love.” When I think about it, I twist it to reflect how I’m feeling. If you see me wearing it, though, don’t read too much into what it says because many times I just slide it on and go.

After the break-in at my townhouse, the CSI guy noticed my ring and complimented me on it. My response: “I have it on ‘faith’ because I don’t feel loved or hopeful.” His response? “You still have all three. It’s just that the people who did this to you don’t have faith, hope, or love.”

Still. I’ve had three conversations with three different friends in the last twenty-four hours about sadness and the ways it pervades our lives. On paper, we’re all doing well. We have jobs. Friends. Families who love us. On paper, you might trade places with one of us. Maybe even all four of us. So why don’t any of us feel particularly happy or hopeful? And is there any way to reclaim such happiness and hope? Can you get back the faith, hope and love once you’ve given up on it? And, really, where does it reside?

I had lunch recently with a guy who told me his mom had been clinically depressed since he was twelve. I asked him why he thought that was. “She always looked for her happiness in other people. She never found it.”

On some level, I know and believe that you can only be happy with others once you find that happiness within. Regardless of how Deepak that might sound, I think it’s true. So then the real question becomes: How do we do that? Especially as women, where we constantly devalue our own worth and just as constantly hand that worth over to others and say, “Please devalue me a little more to confirm my own devaluation.”

We can go to yoga or therapy or get drunk five times a week. We can bury ourselves with work, with play, with prescription drugs. Most people I know have done many of these, often in tandem. I’ve yet to see them be successful at the inner happiness thing.

A wise, older friend of mine always says the same thing to me on the rare occasions I am lucky enough to see her, as we live thousands of miles apart. “I just wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”

I just said almost the same thing to one of the friends referenced above, who is also thousands of miles away. I see beauty in her, beauty & greatness. Intelligence, laughter, love. But it’s not what she sees when she looks in her own mirror. I get that.

Someone else I love always says to me, “Get out of the mirror.” I know he means literally. Stop staring at the mirror looking for the flaws. But maybe that’s what we all need to do: Get out of our inner mirror, mirror on the wall that will never see ourselves as anything resembling fair.

Would that bring us to faith in ourselves? Hope for ourselves? Love for ourselves?

Perhaps we have to bar love from the equation, because we are never guaranteed love, and we are never guaranteed that the love we receive will be enough to make us believe we should be loved. Let’s get rid of hope while we’re at it, because what is hope, really, if not hope for love, even hope for self-love? Hope, you’re out.

So all that’s left is faith, and I think that’s apropos.

Fake it until you make it. Act as if. Phrases left over from a different part of my life that should hold just as true today. Perhaps that’s the only way to truly find happiness: telling ourselves it’s there. Telling ourselves it will all work out, even when we don’t feel like it will. And maybe, without our realizing it, faith will show up, with hope and love right on its heels.

One can hope.

At the end of the day, faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don’t really expect it. It’s like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And it’s not so important that it’s happy ever after, just that it’s happy right now. See, once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you. And once in a while, people may even take your breath away. -Meredith, Grey's Anatomy