My therapist told me today that in the seven-plus years she’s worked with me, she’s watched me learn how to have hope again, how to trust in the safety of hope. That based on all she’s learned about me in all this time, it seems like this regaining of hope emerged for me in my thirties, coming back to me for the first time since I was eleven years old.

Let that sink in for a minute. I learned definitively at eleven years old that hope was dangerous. Too dangerous to hold, too dangerous to even consider allowing for myself. Trusting to hope would only lead to pain and suffering, and by eleven years old, I’d had enough experience with vain hopes that I’d abandoned the practice altogether.

I’m 35 now, almost 36. Let’s do the math. I went without hope, plodded along faithless, for OVER TWENTY YEARS. And the person I was when I first started seeing my therapist would have shrugged that off, disregarded the travesty that it is. That person was too used to finding hope to be about as useful as a warped paper clip. Being hopeless was just a factual matter of my existence, like having dark hair or being short.

That’s appalling to me now, because I’ve been able to relearn the value and beauty of hope. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way recently that when hope fails, it’s a major trigger for me, of all things. It’s in my best interest to try hard to stay present at difficult times, because slipping back into my trauma can apparently sneak right up on me. Now that I’ve come to realize how hard I’ve had to work to overcome my hopelessness, to enable myself to hope again, I don’t ever want to lose that.

Ironically, even before my therapist brought up this idea of my battle to regain hope, for days now if not weeks, I’ve been replaying a quote from The Lord of the Rings in my head. In the book, it’s a pair of lines spoken in Elvish by Aragorn’s mother of her son; in the film version, it’s turned into dialogue between Elrond and Aragorn himself. The translation to English is as follows:

“I give hope to Men; I keep none for myself.”

I’ve been thinking about these lines with the idea that I try very hard to encourage the people around me to stay positive, but all the while I’m feeling quite hopeless myself. It’s felt rather dreadful, as you can imagine. But it’s not where I want to be; I’ve realized I lived in that dark place for most of my life, and I have no inclination to return.

As such, I’m reminded now of another quote from The Lord of the Rings, purely the film version this time. It’s a quote I want to cling to far more than I want to allow the previous quote to continue taking up space in my mind. So, in anticipation of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, a young boy drafted to fight is sharing with Aragorn that the men of Rohan feel overwhelmed and hopeless. And Aragorn grips the lad’s shoulder, and he says simply:

“There is always hope.”