Instead of worrying about the life we wish we had lived, we can create a new life we’re excited to participate in
If this Halloween your house is haunted with ghosts from the past, there is something we can do for them to find the light and leave our human plane.
Sometimes the past becomes a place we keep returning to, ridiculously hoping to find a different ending to something that already happened. This habit can be very addictive because even though it hurts us, it also protects us from the vulnerability implied in looking for a newer place to start.
The relationship that could’ve worked if only we’d done this or that, the person we could’ve been, the career we never pursued. The life not lived can come back to haunt us, and hopecore is the way I found to reignite the curiosity for a better life that might be waiting ahead.
There is a possibility that the future can still surprise us; we just have to invest in it. We have to go looking for it even when we’re convinced the best parts of our lives are already behind us, precisely because we don’t know, and if we never leave the house, we’ll never find out.
Memory is necessary; sometimes we need to make sense of what happened to have a better life moving forward, but if we spend more time remembering than we do living, then we’ve got something to fix.
Sometimes I think nostalgia is a way of protecting ourselves from things we can’t control. At least the past is done and it can’t bring us no surprises, but that’s a very sad way of living.
The messages in hopecore memes can seem naive, but to me, in a world filled with messages that romanticize sadness, they are a way to reintroduce a discourse that focuses on all the things we have yet to discover.
Some people fall in love again at seventy years old; it just takes a very open heart that hasn’t hardened and closed itself through time; that is why it happens to very few people. We cannot let it happen to us.
People break our hearts, and then we meet other people who fix them. Both experiences are worth it, and both are tied to each other; you can’t have one without the other. We have to learn to love both sides of the coin and learn to let go.
So this Halloween, I want to propose a ritual of hopecoremaxxing to kick all the ghosts of the past out of our haunted houses. I want you all to turn on your favourite candles, put on music that gives you butterflies in your stomach, and permit yourself to imagine the best-case scenario happening to you.
Maybe the ghosts never disappear completely, but I can assure you they become less powerful the minute other living presences enter your home, so don’t stop inviting them.
Hope you have a great, un-haunted week from now on then!
