Hope is all you have

You have an idea

You would like to do something. You think it is a good idea. You have been incubating this for some time and you decided to go for it. Each of us has been there. You know it is important enough for you and you want to invest all the energy. You start planning things and it all starts taking up some shape. Will it work? You have no idea. Because at this moment hope is all you have.

Do you remember how long you were pondering bariatric surgery? Most likely for years. You were always on the fence. Do it or not? It sounded like a good idea but you were aware of the risks. And it was strong enough to deter you from doing it. Until something happened. Your breaking point. Something so painful or so scary that you decided to act. It was the final push.

Did you know what you were doing?

You will laugh with me now (I am 2,5 years after) and say that had you known what you were doing that time, in no way would you have undergone that. Am I right? 😀 We were full of hope, and ideas, we thought we had it all figured out. We hope things will work for us and that we will lose the silly weight and become healthy again. It is true.

When you think about it from today’s perspective, at that time, we had nothing more than hope. We decided to undergo a major surgery based on hope. It had to be strong enough to push us to do that. It is crazy. How many times in your life have you decided something this important based on hope only? Thinking about it, marriage is the same, to tell the truth. You also hope that it will work and that they live together happily ever after.

Something hope is all we have left

There is nothing more to keep us going. We hope things will work out for us. That we will make it through the surgery, that we will do reasonably in the initial stages, that we will be able to eat things like before (this is a particularly funny one, right?), that we will lose the extra weight, that we will be healthy again.

We are all hyped and confident that we can do that. We planned things out, we thought we were all prepared and that it would work for us. Again: until we woke up after the surgery and the very first thought was: what have I done to myself? 😀 Yes, we all have been there.

So why is it that hope works so strongly for us?

What is this “thing” that pushes us to do incredible and unspeakable things? We have nothing tangible in our hands and we bet everything on this imaginary something. Is it that we believe so much in ourselves? One would think that we need much more than some uncertain promise toward the future to make us do something.

With the surgery, I think that it is all because desperate people do desperate things. We have suffered for so long and so much, the weight keeps winning no matter what we do and how much we keep trying. So we get to the point when we decide to do something completely crazy, something so incredible, that it is the very last thing we have left that we haven’t tried yet. And we hope that although it is a drastic decision it will save us.

We put everything at stake and we hope that this is the thing that will solve all our problems. Yet we are unaware that what we hoped for is only a tool that will help us to do all the work we need to do by ourselves. We hope that the surgery is the thing that will save us. But at some point we get it. It is not the surgery that will save us, it is us.

No one will save you, it is you

It is we who have to undergo all the stages, make the required changes in our day-to-day lives, start eating better, be aware of what we are doing around food, and do exercise albeit we are no sports people. It all depends on us. No hope will work for us. For some it can be a rude awakening, for others, it is a relief because they feel they are in control in this new situation.

All of a sudden we shifted from hope, that uncertain, naive, and imaginary future, to the present where hard work and change take place and we are the heroes of the story. Things became very real. We don’t hope anymore, we see firsthand the results of our actions. Things are here and now. The good part is that we can act on that all and adjust our behavior and decisions if we are not completely happy with the results.

Life is now

All the future maybes and uncertainties are gone. It is all already happening. Maybe not completely the way we hoped for, but the results are here, we are losing weight, and even if we are struggling and things get really hard at times, there are real results and we see outcomes every day.

The first thing we had to do was to have hope, think about the future, dream, and imagine what things would be like. And we fell in love with what we saw so much that we decided to do that. Now things are done and we are living the outcomes every single day. It may not be completely the way we wanted, but it is certainly progress from the previous stage where everything was the same for years, maybe even decades.

Some people can have second thoughts about the decision they made, some may be surprised and taken aback, and others may feel deceived. It is nothing the way they hoped. Hope can be a great motivator. It can help us do things we would never dare to do otherwise. But sometimes we feel blue, under the water, and deceived. We may think we didn’t do the right thing. But it is too late to question it. Things are done.

It will be ok. Eventually…

The good part is that bariatric surgery is a very emotional process (no one will tell you). Even if you think you made a terrible mistake in the beginning, when things are the hardest, you will usually change the point of view as time passes. When you start seeing the results, when you see the progress, when the scales start telling you that YES, you are losing weight, you fit in smaller clothes, you are more mobile, you can cross your legs… it all counts.

It starts to add up slowly. At first, you are not aware of that at all, you are overwhelmed with making things work day by day, you barely survive you think, but it is all happening already and before you know it, you are already living the life you had hoped for in the very beginning. One day you wake up and you realize that everything you could only dream of, all that you have NOW. It happened.

It all happened while you were busy making small decisions every day, when you were fighting to drink enough, to do the exercise, and when you were doing all the changes that seemed unsurmountable in the very beginning. You underwent a transformation that you couldn’t dream of. Something so profound and life-changing that people who had known you for decades don´t recognize you now.

You hoped for something and it all turned out to be a million times better than your wildest dreams. It was not easy, sometimes it was physically painful, sometimes you felt deep despair, you thought you couldn’t do it one single day more… and here you are, the beautiful butterfly who hoped for this all while waiting in a green ugly larva. You are reborn. Your life can start again now! And it all started with a vague hope 🙂