Fragile Optimism

I have been called Pollyanna and a hopeless optimist.  The people who said those things were not complementing me.  I wonder if they have any idea how difficult it is to keep looking for good, to keep being hopeful.

People act like it's a weakness, a sin, a mark of stupidity, or an affront to them personally if I try to believe that change is possible, if I believe that things can be better, if I think that badness isn't everywhere.  Why is it so much more clever, so much more holy and right to see darkness than light?

All that sort of thinking does is poison everything.  If you believe that evil is everywhere, you will most certainly never find anything else.  If you maintain that nothing ever changes for the better, I'm sure that in your presence, it will always be exactly as you've always seen it.  Your attitude will crush out any tender new green shoot that manages to push its way through that rocky soil.  

And you know what?  Maybe that's the way you like it.  Maybe it validates something inside you when you shove and the world shoves you back.  It gives you a moment to hold up your hand and say, "I told you so.  I knew it.  THIS is what I was talking about.  I was right all along...."

However.

I know that there are monsters in the world, flaws in the manufacture, and that sometimes we're given orders that may lead us down paths that will take us to the edges of sanity.  I know that people are frequently savage and all too often give into instincts that do them harm instead of credit.  I am a dancing fool, but I am not oblivious to all reality. 

But you have to quit shoving my face in it; you have to quit kicking me down the stairs, especially about the things that I love most. Sometimes hope is all there is, the dream of the thing wanted, that thing made perfect, when the thing itself is not.   I respect that you may think that there is no good possible anywhere at any time.  It grieves my soul, but that's your belief.  So be it.  Get off of mine. 

You're hurting me with your constant negativity and I can't take it anymore.  I need this hope to get where I'm going.  I have to fan this little spark to keep the embers burning when the flames themselves are gone.  The day it dies completely (and it came so close last year...so very, very close) will be the day I have to stop altogether.  When I can't have a dream, a way to move forward, when the fire dies inside, then I'll just be a hollowed-out shell.