On Hold

Some boxes are packed to stay.

An eleven-year relationship. A closet in the spare room holding eight boxes. Taped shut. Stacked against the back wall. Ready to move. Books, mostly. A coffee grinder. My winter coats.

Nobody ever asked about them. The closet was not hidden and that door got opened a hundred times.

I remember the packing taking an afternoon, and feeling calm the entire time. I was going to leave. I also thought we would be fine. Both feelings, on the same Tuesday.

There were good weeks. We worked on it, harder some months than others. On most days I believed we would get back to it. I wanted it to work. I have never been clear on whether that was about him or about the eleven years.

I could have left any day, and I have wondered whether that is what made it possible to stay. Every winter I opened the box with the coats in it. I took out what I needed. Then I taped it shut again.

The boxes stayed where they were for the last three years.

What do you hope for?

Hope arrives at the edge of what you can do.

It separates cleanly from optimism, though the two words get swapped constantly. Optimism is a forecast riding on odds you consider good. Hope carries outcomes that matter more, are less likely, and sit further outside your control.

You do not hope the elevator arrives. You hope the biopsy is clean.

The split shows up in how people describe them. Optimism came back as a thought roughly four times out of five. Hope came back as an emotion at close to the same rate.

Optimism gets described without any mention of wanting. Hope cannot be described without it.

Wishing sits closest to it. A wish can be held at no cost, from a distance, about something you have no stake in. Hope requires the stake.

So hope needs three conditions at once. An outcome that matters. Odds that are poor. No way to force it.

A sure thing does not qualify. Neither does something flatly impossible. Hope occupies the narrow band between them. Low control is part of the definition, not a weakness in the person holding it.

***

Hope asks you to stay invested in something you cannot influence, for as long as it stays open. That is what makes it expensive.

The cost sits in the unresolved state. Waiting on an outcome they cannot affect, people show stress that tracks the uncertainty rather than the result. It peaks when the odds sit near even, not when the bad result is certain.

A known bad outcome is easier to carry than a coin flip.

Hope also has no natural duration. An exam result settles in weeks. Whether a relationship recovers can stay unsettled for a decade. A hope carried for nine years sits differently than one picked up in March.

Hope keeps the outcome in the room, unfinished, every single day.

***

Hope also holds when the evidence turns against it.

Doctors soften a prognosis to protect the hope of the patient. Among people entering early-phase cancer trials, hope showed no association with prognostic understanding. It made no difference whether they knew treatment could not cure them.

Across 52 studies of people living with incurable cancer, close to 30 percent said they believed their cancer was curable. The same people reported that their doctor had told them treatment could not cure it.

Both things were held at once. The information had arrived, in plain language, from the person best placed to deliver it.

The hope stayed where it was.

Which means the odds were never what it rested on. Possibility is enough, and possibility does not run out.

Hope is worth something. It keeps you attached to a thing long after that costs you. Whatever you are still hoping for, you have not let go of, and that took work.

So notice where yours actually sits.

Some hopes have a lever nobody is pulling. You hope the marriage improves, that the work turns into what you wanted. Effort could still reach those and does not.

Others have no lever at all. A diagnosis. A body. Someone who has already decided. Trying harder does nothing, and being told otherwise is an insult.

In both cases something is being postponed. With a lever, it is the attempt. Without one, it is the conversation you would have. The trip you would book. The thing you would say if you stopped waiting to find out.

As long as she might call, you do not have to leave. As long as the scan might be clean, nobody has to talk about what happens if it is not. Hope keeps the question open, and an open question requires nothing from you.

What you are actually deciding is how much of your life stays on hold while the outcome settles.

You can wait. But there is a difference between waiting because you chose to and waiting because nobody asked you to choose.

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}