Optimism may be irrational, but it's helping me get through this pandemic
Looking back on when my mum died several years ago, it would be easy for me to count every time I thought she might live as a moment of stupidity. She had stage four lung cancer. Even with the best treatment in the world, her chances of getting through it were minuscule. But that didn’t stop me from crying tears of joy when, a few weeks after she started immunotherapy, I saw a scan showing that the tumour had shrunk. I tried to stop myself, but images of her – strong, and loud, and cackling her head off again
– flooded my mind. Anxious people know what it is to be a slave to the eternal “what if?”, but what if the “what if” is about everything going right?
Even as I held her limp hand in the ambulance to the hospice, a microscopic but irrepressible part of me thought a 180-degree turn was possible. She was still my mum; she still said “fuck” a lot, and loved us aggressively, and had red hair, even though the grey roots were slowly taking over. But yes, it was deranged – at this point – for me to hope for anything other than an end to my mum’s pain. But sometimes “deranged” is exactly what you need.
Optimism gets a bad rap. Sometimes rightly so. This year, obviously, optimism has been partially responsible for a lot of idiocy. “It’s just flu,” said the optimists, as they continued to lick handrails well into April. And of course, there’s been a lot of dangerously optimistic rhetoric (sincere or otherwise) from Boris “let the plebs die of Christmas” Johnson. Optimism can be a gateway drug to either recklessness or passivity. But the year my mum died – and once again this year – I couldn’t have survived without it.
In the last month of the cursed year that is 2020, the urge to tell myself that everything is basically going to be OK has become a need. Unfortunately, this does mean (internally at least) scream