The hope within me

By Em, age 14

I’m not familiar with hope. Did you know that your mind tends to spiral the longer you’re isolated? And that humans are social creatures? We need to form and maintain connections to survive. It becomes increasingly difficult to find hope when people start killing it. It devolves into something worse when those “people” are you. In the early stages of the pandemic, I felt myself start to fade. I couldn’t talk to any of my friends, and my family was just as tense as I was. The mindset I entered was dark and full of despair. It felt like my final tie to society had been fully severed. Fortunately, I was able to receive the proper help to overcome those feelings. Through the pandemic, I’ve learned that you can’t commodify hope. You can’t box it up and sell it on shelves with pretty packaging. It’s something forged in you after endless anxiety and misery. It’s something raw and intangible, a force that binds us all together. Perhaps, I’ve been familiar with hope this entire time.