Someone asked me to write about hope yesterday. And you gotta give what your readers want right? Also, what a word this is.

Imagine the magnanimity of it — five letters carrying the unbearable weight of survival. The beauty of hope is that no matter who we are, no matter how bruised or broken we become, we return to it instinctively. We hope for better days, better careers, better pay, better love, better friends. We hope for a better life. Even when life has given us every reason not to.

This year, especially, has tested my relationship with hope. It has not been kind. It has not been gentle. It arrived with lessons I did not ask for and endings I did not consent to. It took people, certainty, comfort — and replaced them with silence, questions, and an aching kind of clarity. There were moments when hope felt foolish, almost offensive. Like a naïve friend who refused to understand how tired I was of believing.

And yet, here I am.

What this year has taught me is that hope is not loud. It doesn’t announce itself with optimism or blind positivity. Hope is quiet. It sits beside you on days when getting out of bed feels like a victory. It looks like showing up even when your heart is still in pieces. It looks like choosing to believe that the version of life you are walking away from is not the only one you will ever know.

Hope, this year, was staying when everything in me wanted to shut down. It was trusting that rejection was not redirection’s cruel cousin, but its necessary beginning. It was learning that endings do not erase the meaning of what once was — they simply make space for what has yet to arrive. It was allowing myself to grieve without deciding that grief would be my permanent address.

I didn’t always hope gracefully. Some days hope showed up as stubbornness. Some days it looked like tears and clenched jaws and whispered please into the dark. But even then, hope persisted — not because I was strong, but because something inside me refused to believe that this was all there was.

Hope did not promise me ease. It promised me continuity. It promised that even after disappointment, even after heartbreak, even after a year that demanded more than I thought I could give, life would still offer me mornings worth waking up for. New conversations. New versions of myself. New joys I cannot yet name.

So yes, hope is a magnificent word. Not because it guarantees happiness, but because it keeps us moving forward despite the absence of it. And if this year has forced anything upon me, it is this quiet, defiant kind of hope — the kind that survives not because life is good, but because I am still here, still trying, still believing that better days are not behind me.

They are waiting.