It's 4am, again

A year on, has anything changed?

Last year I published this about my mental state and the state of the charity sector and its funding. Today I came back to the same spot to reflect on how things are now. 

I woke up at 4am again. The sense of dread just out of sight, somewhere in my peripheral vision, but looming and waiting, ready to invade. I realise, as we are back in the caravan in Winchelsea, that it is actually a baby seagull playing with a stone on the roof that has woken me. At 4am it is easy to allow the dread that sits, like a muscle with a long memory, to edge closer. This morning I don’t let it. 

This year I have the strength to keep the dread at bay, even though some days that act of defiance is bone-achingly exhausting. You see, running a small, grassroots anti-poverty charity is still, very nearly, impossibly difficult. The funding situation has not changed. We are still scrabbling around under the table gathering the crumbs that are dropped and discarded and making them, by some sort of sorcery, into magnificent, nurturing, feasts for the people we support. We still watch and wait as funders make promises they do not keep. We still fight against a system that was designed to keep us downtrodden and despairing. 

I realise now that the pain I felt last year was because I had lost the most powerful, and dangerous, thing I could possibly have: hope. 

Losing hope was a terrifying experience. My belief in the good in others, my optimism and my fundamental driving force had slipped from my grasp and was disappearing with the certainty of water down a plug hole. 

You simply cannot do good work, and do it well, without hope. 

Hope returned in much the same way that despair had taken over. Despair is fuelled by indifference, heartlessness and unrelenting greed. Those insidious things that take from you and care not for the consequence. The very same values and mentality that so much of our so-called social security system is actually rooted in. 

Sometimes despair creeps in, its tendrils invading and colluding to bring you down and sometimes it crashes in, obliterating a once strong foundation. For me, despair was creeping right up until the moment it crashed in and made my world so dark. When hope returned, it did so in the same way. It crept into my periphery, nudged and sometimes shoved by the love of others. Hope returned, encouraged and grown by generosity and deep, powerful empathy. Then there it was, back again, that fire in my belly reignited and stronger than ever. Hope for a better life for the people my charity supports and a righteous anger at the systems that keep so many in despair. 

The only counter to despair is hope. Hope, with its deep love, generosity and powerful empathy is a dangerous and precious thing for a woman like me to have, and I have it. 

(Unsurprisingly to those in the know: the soundtrack to my early morning walk on the beach was ‘Hope is dangerous thing for a woman like me to have’ by Lana Del Ray)