№ 00044: Optimism
A relatable pandemic hangover
Today on Something Lost, our first returned claim ticket. It’s № 00044, looking to claim their sense of hope and excitement for the future.
This is a deeply relatable claim to submit. Many of us might have lost our own sense of optimism right around the same time, March 2020, which for the sake of posterity or for anyone mercifully suffering from amnesia was the start of the covid-19 pandemic. I have seen similar claims for lost optimism before, some dating back a few years earlier to the start of the Trump administration. But there is no denying that it has been a tough decade for hope.
№ 000444 also shared this about their lost object claim:
Dear friend — I so empathize with your desire to reclaim a feeling from before everything changed. I have been in that situation as well. I have desperately wished I could gather up all the things that I know now that I wish I didn’t; the lessons learned from both personal crises and through a series of world events that held a mirror up to all my previously understood notions about how we as humans relate to ourselves and to one another. I have wished I could gather them all up and stuff them back down where they came from and pretend I never saw them.
The metaphor that comes to mind is Pandora’s Box, which in modern idiomatic usage is kind of used as interchangeable with “a can of worms” or basically any catalyst to unintended consequences that can’t easily be undone.
But did you know? When I looked up the actual myth of Pandora to refresh myself, I learned something I didn’t know (or maybe had forgotten).
Zeus left Pandora on Earth and gave her a beautiful, mysterious box with instructions to never, ever open it. But Pandora was only human, and eventually couldn’t keep herself from opening it, and out flew all of humanity’s woes: disease, violence, greed, sadness, death. But unbeknownst to Zeus, Prometheus had hidden something else in the box:
Hope.
The very thing you’ve lost.
So, keep a lookout. I have a feeling that now that you have submitted the claim, you may be able to reach out and find a little bit. It will look different than it did before we opened the box. But it’s there, having been transformed by loss and grief.
Thank you for submitting your lost object claim.
