What happens when the entirety of your being recognizes that the thing it most deeply yearned for is no longer possible?

What happens when you can no longer ignore the physical sensations of your body signaling that your current relationship/job/situation/reality will continue to yield only pain, disappointment, and unhealth, and you must make the painful yet necessary decision to leave. 

Or better yet, what happens when a relationship/job/dream/reality is taken away from you? Not because of your doing, but because of the actions (or inaction) of another?  

Pursed lips and scrunched forehead
Deep breaths and closed eyes
Knots gnaw at instestines,
Body fighting to digest the truth:

We cannot return to what was

In my last blog post, I wrote about the heartbreak and bewildering grief I experienced at not being able to feel at home in my ancestral land. But what I didn’t tell y’all about was the painfully messy aftermath of that heartache and heartbreak…I didn’t tell y’all about how I refused to accept the death of my dream, and instead attempted to keep hope alive by daily texting with a 29-year-old Cape Verdean beach boy I had met 36 hours before leaving the islands (we’ll call him A for anonymity).

“I think I keep reaching out to A because I’m still struggling to fully accept the death of my dream of finding home in Cabo Verde. Texting A is my way of (re)opening the casket to see if my dream truly is dead. Texting him is me hoping that perhaps if I (re)open the casket, I might find some movement, some sign of life, a sign of possible revival…”

For four months, I oscillated between the bargaining and denial phases of grief, attempting to believe it was still possible for me to find home in Cape Verde. After one-hundred-and-twenty days of this back and forth, I began to wonder if I was trapped in the same cycle as individuals stuck in cycles of physically abusive relationships. Had I become so desperate for things to be different than they were, that I had begun to lie to myself, trying to believe that a different reality was possible? Had I just spent four months convincing myself that the reality I was experiencing was only temporary and change was a’coming…

Hope

We open the casket, as our bodies tell us we shouldn’t
We already know what to expect
We know exactly what will  ensue
Play by play
We are oh-so familiar with the Frankenstein that will emerge
Because this isn’t our first time opening up the casket and peeking in
This isn’t our first time returning to play with fire
We are painfully intimate with the disappointment that will ensue,
the anger,
the frustration 
that will inevitably come
Yet we still approach the the casket
Returning to the corpse
Hopeful

When we are desperate, we hope. 

In the case of the Cape Verdean beach boy, I tried to convince myself that perhaps if I sent just one more text or had one more video call, somehow it would fill the deep ache in my heart for feeling at home and loved. When A started showing the inevitable signs of inconsistency and lack of interest, I told myself I was misunderstanding things…maybe he didn’t really mean to stand me up on our virtual date to cook Katxupa together, it was an accident, a mistake, or poor communication on my end… Memories of past decisions to leave jobs/relationships/situations crept into my mind: Maybe I’m being weak/giving up if I leave now…I kept texting A because a part of me wanted to believe that maintaining contact with him would fulfill my deep longing to remain connected to my ancestral homeland…

What’s the difference 
between Delusion and Hope? 
Where does one draw the line?
Is there a difference at all?

For four months, I chose hope instead of accepting my reality because it was too excruciatingly painful to believe that the form in which I imagined receiving my heart’s deepest desire no longer existed. However, eventually the recurrent pain of being disappointed and disregarded by A was too much for my heart, and I stopped all communication with him. I allowed myself to feel the fullness of my grief and I crucifed my hope. I stopped revisting the casket and allowed what was dead to remain dead. I stopped trying to resurrect corpses.

__________________________

To be honest, I’ve struggled to write this blog post because it’s easy to write about the need to crucify a particular type of hope given my past experiences, but what then? Do I simply end this post with/in hopelessness?

Even more so, to be writing about the Crucifixion of Hope on Easter weekend of all weekends—the weekend that, for Christians, is all about all about the Hope of the Resurrection—has felt a bit sacrilegious.

But the truth is, I believe today is the perfect day to write about Hope Crucified because the significance of the Easter holiday lies more in the Crucifixion of the Christ than in His Resurrection. The Hope of a Saviour was crucified the day Jesus was nailed to the cross, and when people woke up on the Saturday after the Crucifixion, they were forced to grieve and accept the reality that their hopes and dreams had died. Their Hope in Jesus the Christ coming to save them in the form of overturning the Roman Empire was dead and very much gone. Hope was crucified and followers of Jesus were forced to reckon with the, what now? Do I believe in God or nah? Do I believe in a Divine Plan apart from the specific ways in which I had hoped the Divine Plan to play out? Even when Jesus resurrects, He leaves again, ascending into the sky, leaving people to wrestle with more hopes crucified.

There was no returning to a former condition, only an unpredictable and grief-filled path forward in accepting reality as it was, asking, “What now?”

__________________________

This is the very same question we, in 2025, are in desperate need of reckoning and wrestling with: What now?

Maybe you had hoped Trump wouldn’t be President again. 

Maybe you had hoped to still have a job.

Maybe you had hoped a certain relationship would have worked out.

Maybe you had hoped the wars in Gaza/Sudan/everywhere-around-the-world, would be over by now.

What now?

__________________________

Revisiting the story I started this post off with (my four-month back and forth with the 29-year-old Cape Verdean beach boy) it was only when I finally crucifed my hopes that A would text me back that I was able to focus on the deeper grief and more profound crucifixion of the hope that I would have a relationship with my homeland in the way I had imagined. In the crucfixion of my hopes based upon false realities, I was forced to ask myself what deeper truths I was believing. Do I believe I am only worthy of relationships in which I have to beg a man to care about me? Or do I believe I am worthy of love that I don’t have to earn? Do I believe that what is for me, is for me, and cannot be missed? Our underlying beliefs dictate our actions, and if we truly believe something to be true, we must act accordingly. If I truly believed I was worthy of a love that I didn’t have to earn, then it no longer made sense for me to sit and wait around for some random beach boy to text me back. I had to crucify my hope alongside the belief that I was only deserving of a relationship in which I had to beg to be chosen.

Ultimately, crucified hope brings us one step closer to rightfully placed hope because crucified hope means the present moment is the most urgent of moments. Crucified hope means we’re all we got, and we must believe that we are enough because God/Divine Spirit is enough and God/Divine Spirit resides in us. We don’t have to “wait upon the Lord” for some future moment because Heaven is already and always on Earth, and it looks like us tapping into collective creativity and the wisdom of our elders and ancestors. It looks like using the creative genius of systems such as the Underground Railroad and the strategies utilized to protect and hide individuals during the Holocaust to now combat the ICE raids and imprisonments we are witnessing first hand. Because the reality is, hope didn’t end slavery or the Holocaust, action did.

If we were to Believe and Know and Trust deep in our bones that Truths of peace and human dignity and respect and love and care and safety and kindness are meant to be accessible and received by all, how would we act when we see these things and people in opposition? How would we become active human agents to see these truths made evident? What conversations would we be having? What donations would we be giving? What books would we be reading? What communities would we be joining? How would we make decisions out of these universal, never-changing truths?

ACTION STEPS:
Over the next week, notice how many times you use the word hope.
Every time you use the word, take a moment to pause and reflect. What do you actually mean when you use that word? Is your hope tied to a specific outcome or expectation? Is there an opportunity for you to crucify a version of your hope to make space for a more rightly placed hope? And if you choose to hold onto your hope/s, what belief systems and actions underly that hope? What are you doing to make sure your hope/s don’t stay in the abstract, but instead become Hope made real; a hope that is truly transformative?