The Correlation Between Hopes and Failures

Let’s talk a bit about hopes. They’re fickle things, really, changing from day to day like the weather; mildly steady for about a week before being lost and forgotten in the fog of the human mind. We all hope; we all dream; we all hope that one day we’ll actually have enough courage and determination to follow through and actually see one of these hopes through to the end. But time after time we let ourselves down, distracted by the latest gadget, the most recent post on (insert media site here), the next best thought that enters our fragile heads. We are so easily swayed by what is right in front of us. And maybe that’s the problem.

I myself have had several ideologies of how my life would be by the time that I graduated high school. I would be well on my way to finishing my first novel. As a person who has struggled with their weight and the constant flood of self-hating because of it since I was little, I imagined a self who was comfortable in her skin regardless of the size (though I admit that I remained hopeful that I would perhaps be wearing skin that wasn’t so big). The harsh cold reality of the fact is that at least half of what I had hoped to accomplish as of four years ago never happened. I have novels that are infantile, barely out of the second chapter with a style that I probably wouldn’t recognize anymore as my own. I am still extremely self-conscious and have a volatilely negative perception of myself, which has refused to shrink despite many attempts to fix it. These now simply feel like childhood fantasies, the type of idea that all children get when they are little and imagine their futures in twenty years: famous, more money than they know what to do with, a spouse, children. There are probably hundreds of reasons that I haven’t been successful in many things, but I credit it at least partially to my faith that hope and hope alone could pull me through my problems. That isn’t the way that this world works. If you only hope for something, your chances of getting what you want is negligible unless you’re a Disney princess. You actually have to work for it, and want it more than anything else. And if you do fail… Maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough to begin with.