to live for the hope of it all.
a messy, honest guide to choosing hope when everything feels pointless
March 2025 was the worst month of my life.
One day I was fine, the next I couldn't get out of bed. Depression hit like a fucking truck and suddenly everything felt impossible. Going to classes felt as hard as climbing Mount Everest. Washing my hair induced even more dread than before (curly hair girls know). I’d want to leave the dining hall 5 minutes after I went in and simultaneously never wanted to leave my bed. I think over the first week of March, I ate a grand total of 4 meals. Essentially, the simplest things became these massive obstacles I couldn't climb over.
I was so sad all the time. I felt the emptiness wholly, like someone had reached inside me and scooped out everything that made me me. I'd sit there staring at my walls, my phone, not sad, not angry, just... nothing.
And then the thoughts started.
When Nothing Feels Real
Why am I even trying? That question was the most valuable tool of the devil sitting in my brain. Why am I putting myself through pain and forcing myself to eat when literally none of this matters? We're all just going to be dead someday anyway. Hell, the sun's going to explode eventually and take everything with it. The universe could not give less of a shit about me crying in my car after therapy.
I googled the term ‘existential dread’ so much in that one month that I’d frankly never like to hear the term again. I went back to it like it was going to give me new answers every time. Something more manageable, more workable, more hopeful. Maybe someone had figured out how to make the whole "we're just temporary arrangements of atoms" thing feel less devastating. Spoiler alert: they hadn't. Every philosophy forum and Reddit thread just confirmed what I already knew—we're cosmic accidents who got consciousness by mistake, and we're all just killing time until we stop existing.
But honestly? The big picture meaninglessness was tolerable to an extent. What was worse was watching the world actively fall apart in real time and feeling like I was the only one who seemed to actually give a damn. Trump got elected and immediately started doing exactly what he said he'd do, which apparently shocked everyone except the people who'd been paying attention. The news was just plane crashes and wildfires and mass shootings on repeat. Gaza was—is—a nightmare that everyone argues about online while doing absolutely nothing. The city I was going to college in felt like it was competing for most depressing local headlines: another overdose, another shooting, another person just trying to get to work who didn't make it home.
And everyone around me just... kept going to the club? Kept posting their little aesthetic photos and talking about their weekend plans like the world wasn't literally on fire? I couldn't figure out if I was losing my mind or if everyone else had already lost theirs.
I started resenting happy people in this truly ugly way. Like, how dare you complain about your B+ in a class when children are being bombed? How can you laugh at parody tiktoks when democracy is crumbling? Are you stupid or ignorant or just heartless? Pick one.
But then I'd lie awake at night wishing I could be that stupid. Wishing I could just turn off whatever part of my brain wouldn't let me ignore how fucked everything was. I wanted to care less so badly it hurt. But every time I tried to just... not think about it, I felt like I was betraying everyone who was actually suffering. Like my awareness was the least I could do, even though it was destroying me.
I convinced myself I was more evolved or something. More awake. Like I'd been chosen to see reality while everyone else got to live in their little bubbles. Which sounds incredibly pretentious now, but at the time it felt true. It felt like I was carrying the weight of actual consciousness while everyone else sleepwalked through life.
The personal shit and the world shit just blended together into this one massive why-bother. We're specks of dust on a dying planet run by psychopaths, and my brain chemistry is broken, and none of it means anything anyway. So why go to therapy? Why take pills that might not work? Why make plans with friends? Why get out of bed? Why apply to jobs? Why pretend that any of this matters when in fifty years we'll probably all be dead from the climate change crisis no one cares about enough to fix anyway?
The Messy Truth About Getting Better
Nobody warns you that healing from depression is like trying to put together IKEA furniture while blindfolded. There's no manual (and if there is, it’s complete and utter shit), half the pieces seem to be missing, and you're never quite sure if you're making progress or just creating a more elaborate mess.
I'd have these random good days that felt like pranks. I'd wake up and actually want to get out of bed, maybe even put on jeans. I'd think, "Holy shit, am I finally getting better?" Then I'd crash by 2 pm and spend the rest of the day crying in my bed and self-loathing till I fell asleep. Or I'd feel like absolute garbage all morning, then find myself genuinely laughing at some dumb tiktok and immediately feel guilty about it.
The progress snuck up on me in the weirdest ways. I'd realize I'd been listening to music for twenty minutes without it sounding like meaningless noise. Or I'd actually taste my coffee instead of just drinking it because caffeine. These moments felt so small and stupid, but also kind of… miraculous? Like my brain was slowly remembering how to do its job.
The Day I Chose Hope
I can't tell you the exact moment it happened because honestly, there wasn't one. But somewhere in the middle of all that mess, I made this decision that surprised the hell out of me. I decided to live for the hope of it all.
Not because I'd suddenly figured out the meaning of life or because the depression packed up and moved out. I made this choice while I was still deep in it, still questioning everything, still googling "does anything matter" at weird hours.
I'd been journaling every single day that first month, mostly just word-vomiting my thoughts onto paper because keeping them in my head felt dangerous. And somewhere in all those pages of messy handwriting and smudged ink, something started to shift. I started writing things like "I deserve more than this" and "other people deserve more than this too."
There's this one entry I wrote to myself that I keep coming back to. I was scared that my brain would adapt to the sadness and just function around it, that I'd become complacent with living in the deficits instead of actually healing. So I wrote myself this promise: "It's been hard to keep hoping for better days because honestly, it's frustrating to feel stuck, especially from a problem I don't know how to fix. BUT, I believe in myself, in God, and that good is coming my way. I will continue to live for the hope of it all, have faith and patience, and trust in the universe."
I think what really got me was realizing that if I was right about the whole cosmic indifference thing—if there really are infinite possibilities for how things can play out—then some of those possibilities have to be good, right? Like, mathematically speaking, some of those infinite outcomes have to include me feeling better, the world getting less fucked up, people finding ways to be happy despite everything.
I realized that just because the universe is indifferent doesn't mean I have to be. Just because we're all gonna die eventually doesn't mean today has to be garbage. Just because nothing matters on some cosmic level doesn't mean it can't matter to me, right now, sitting in my dorm bed eating hot cheetos and hi-chews for dinner.
Maybe meaning was never supposed to be handed to us anyway. Maybe it was always something we had to create ourselves, like making up the rules to a game nobody taught us how to play. And if that's true, then I get to decide what matters to me. The universe doesn't get a vote.
But more than that—I want a better life. Not just for me, but period. I want to see what happens when I actually try, when I stop using cosmic meaninglessness as an excuse to give up. I'm curious about who I could become if I stopped getting in my own way.
What Hope Actually Looks Like
Living for hope isn't some Instagram quote bullshit where you wake up grateful every day. It's not toxic positivity or pretending everything's fine when your brain is still occasionally trying to convince you that existence is pointless.
For me, it looks like getting out of bed even when I don't want to, because I'm genuinely curious about what today might surprise me with. It's taking my meds even when I'm not sure they're doing anything, because I'm betting on future me feeling different than current me. It's texting my friend back even when I want to disappear, because sometimes connection catches you off guard in the best way.
It's basically giving the middle finger to the part of my brain that insists nothing matters. Every time I choose to try something, to care about something, to keep going despite not having cosmic answers, I'm telling that voice to shut up and sit down.
I started paying attention to small stuff again, not because it solved everything, but because it was evidence that my brain could still be surprised. A text that actually made me smile so wide my jaw was hurting. A song that gave me chills for the first time in months. A sunset that made me stop thinking and just... look.
None of this fixed my existential crisis or magically cured my depression. But it was proof that things could shift, that there were still moments worth catching. And that makes all the difference.
The Brutal Honesty
I'm not "healed." I'm not some success story who figured it all out and now lives in perpetual gratitude. I still have days when the weight comes back and everything feels pointless again. I still lay in bed sometimes wondering what the hell I'm doing and why I'm bothering.
The difference is I've gotten better at living with the uncertainty. I've learned that you don't need to solve the meaning of life to make your life worth living. You don't need to have all the answers to keep asking better questions.
Maybe the point was never to find THE point anyway. Maybe it's simpler and more complicated than that. Maybe it's just showing up for the possibility that tomorrow might feel different than today, even when today feels impossible.
I live for the hope that I might have a conversation that shifts something fundamental in me. That I might wake up one day and feel genuinely excited to be alive. That this depression might lift someday, or that I'll just get better at carrying it without it crushing me.
I don't know what's gonna happen. None of us do. But I'm sticking around to find out, and honestly? That feels like the best thing I can ask of myself anyway.
If You're Reading This From Your Own Dark Place
If you're in your own March right now, if you're drowning in your own emptiness, if the nihilistic thoughts are telling you nothing matters so why bother—I get it. I'm not going to tell you to think positive or count your blessings or any of those overused self-help lines.
But I am going to tell you this: you don't have to have hope to deserve to keep going. You don't have to feel better to be worth the effort. You don't have to solve the riddle of existence to justify your existence.
And trust me, I know that the world is scary and we have no control over that, that we are getting older and that's scary as shit, that life can be brutal, disappointing, unfair.
Live anyway.
If there's even a tiny part of you that's curious about what might happen next, that's enough. If there's even a sliver of you that wonders if tomorrow might feel different than today, that's enough.
You don't have to climb the whole mountain. You don't have to see the point of everything. You just have to take the next step, and then the next one.
Live for the hope of it all. Not the certainty, not the guarantee that everything will be amazing. Just the hope. The possibility. The "what if."
Your story isn’t over yet.
P.S. I found this in my journal from later that month, and I wanted to share it because it shows how the hope started to take shape:
honestly, i'm not the person who leaves comments on substack posts. but reading this makes me wanna cry. i'm in that kind of phase myself and it just keeps going and going and going. these couple days, every day starts the same way, feels the same way and ends the same way. but by reading this, it makes me realise that i'm not completely alone with my thoughts. i do not know you, but god I love for writing this and deciding to publish this. I love God for making me read this post in this exact moment. thank you so much and I hope you'll continue expressing, feeling and sharing this love of yours. the world gets a little bit lighter when people share their own thoughts and emotions, even if they're miles away. thank you so much jia
I usually don't comment. I am a mental health therapist and I felt deeply inspired by this post. Being depressed is an extremely isolating experience and I would like you to know that so many people are feeling what you eloquently wrote.
Despite your darkest moments, you STILL went to therapy, you STILL went to the dining hall, you STILL washed your hair. You only had four meals, but that's better than three. You STILL did the bare minimum, even if it felt impossible. That is everything. Even when you felt nothing and everything, you still did those things because you needed to. Whatever that reason may be, hold onto that.