Hope

I was twenty one.

I had left home with nothing that would show up on a resume — no degree, no pedigree, no skill, no experience. Just the only thing I knew how to do. Outwork everyone else.

The dormitory had roaches. Girls got high on iodex because they couldn't afford better. I was from privilege and had no map for any of it. I made one anyway.

One evening I sat with my friend Rahul and told him life felt like a drudge. That I couldn't see how any of it would ever amount to anything. He listened. And then he said something I have never put down.

You will make it. Because you have hope.

The thing that kills people is not the work or the hardship. It's hopelessness.

I held those words like my life depended on them.

It did.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism is a disposition — a sunny reading of available evidence. Hope has nothing to do with evidence. Hope is what remains when the evidence is against you. When the dormitory has roaches and the future is invisible and the only thing between you and giving up is one sentence from one friend on one evening.

It is the most underestimated thing. It gets filed under greeting cards. That's the mistake.

But in the dormitory, in the dark, it was the only thing that was real.