1. Hopefulessness

Asheville, NC - May 2022

“I would love to live as the river flows,

Carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

When you enter into freedom, possibility comes to meet you.” – John O’Donohue

I woke up in bed, alone, on what felt like the last day of winter. Snow was on the ground, and I was acutely aware of it because I watched it fall from my bedroom window all night long. The streetlight was shining so brightly through the window that I could count every single falling flake. I rose from the bed while it was still dark outside, which is admittedly unusual for me on a Saturday morning after the spring solstice. Groggy, I headed towards the restroom to shower where I was greeted by many of the items left behind: a pair of tacky, plastic earrings by the faucet, a three-fourths empty bottle of lotion in the medicine cabinet, and a stray rag draped over the shower curtain rod. 

Every second, I felt equally relieved yet entirely discombobulated. There was no small, anxious cat running around all night, knocking over lamps and plants, disturbing my downstairs neighbors, yet there was also no furniture left in my living room, no art on the walls, and nobody to greet me in the kitchen in the morning. 

I showered and almost busted my ass on the bathroom floor because there was also no longer a bath mat. I hastily dressed myself and filled up my Nalgene, and I walked across the icy sidewalk to my car, hardly dressed for winter, hardly dressed for spring. I didn’t yearn for a warm, Spring day because I didn’t want to feel sad when it finally became warm out, but being sad and scraping my ice-encrusted windshield on an April morning felt equally as disheartening. 

It’s mid April, I live in an empty apartment, and I got dumped on a Friday night. 

At 7:00AM, I hop in my car, and I drive for eight hours straight, with no direction, in circles, all around the City of Chicago, listening to Sinead O’Connor and Bright Eyes, calling my mother over and over again, calling friends I haven’t spoken with in months, obsessively repeating myself, my troubles, and my woes. I am spiraling as far as the odometer on my car will allow, and I feel as hungover as the morning after my Freshman year “disorientation” party without having had a drop of alcohol the night before. This is simply a manifestation of heartbreak that I am borderline intentionally embodying. 

While on my aimless hell-ride across town, two dear friends phone me from Belfast. Unsurprised by my panic and hopelessness, they encourage me to take my days ten percent more slowly, remember Maszlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, to sit down and eat breakfast every morning, and to spend a great amount of time with friends and chosen family. One of them told me, “Evan, you are not alone in your pain. All of us have felt this way before. Please do not forget that you are very important and that you have many gifts to offer the world.” Besides, they’ve seen me go through breakups before. My reaction is usually something similar before I finally find my footing. However, despite their advice, this one feels different. It’s “the big one.” I’m more lost than I’ve ever been, and the light in me feels as if it’s been taken, as if my spirit has been broken. The next few weeks consisted of incessant late-night Instagram doomscrolling, regularly door-dashing, and ignoring texts from many of my friends and loved ones. Eventually, I would take their advice. At the time, I just had to keep driving. 

Late in the evening, I return home. Feeling heavy, I tip-toe up the comically creaky stairs quietly so as not to wake my neighbors who live underneath my squeaky floors. I turn the key to the lock and hesitantly put my hand on the knob. I pause for a moment and take a deep breath. Trembling, I open the door, step inside, and realize the emptiness. Lips tingling, I feel myself turn flush. The empty floors, the empty walls, the empty shelves and cabinets of my apartment sit quietly as if they’ve been forgotten by time. The grief, loneliness, and absence of light are overwhelming. I realize my empty heart, and I realize that the love that I have lost for myself hurts more than that of the breakup. I am deeply inconsolable, I feel an unfamiliar loneliness, and I am absolutely terrified of what’s on the other side of this door that I realize I’ve slept walked myself through. Being intentionally hard on myself, I say out-loud, “Evan, what did you get yourself into this time?”

Chicago, IL - May 2022

Chicago, IL - May 2022

I key into my new apartment for the first time. The space is empty, dusty, and smells like a gas leak, but the north and south facing windows provide just the right amount of sunlight for my collection of recently abused house plants. It’s small; much smaller than I am used to. My bedroom window overlooks the beautiful swimming pool of the luxury high-rise next door, and my living room window faces directly into my neighbors apartment from across the courtyard. I hang my clothes in the closet but the hangers are so wide that the folding-door cannot be closed all the way. I suppose it will just be like this forever. At the tender age of 28, I am certain that I am the oldest tenant in my Boystown apartment building as I hear the club music radiating from my new downstairs neighbor’s unit at 9:00AM. It’s May 1st,  it’s freezing-ass-cold outside, but I am looking forward to Chicago Summer. For months, I’ll slowly decorate my new space to make it my own, focus on making friends and building community despite knowing hardly anybody outside of my brand-new job, and finding what it means to reconnect with myself in trust, love, and respect. As scary as that can be. 

On my first night in my new apartment, I sit shirtless on my wooden floor, post-shower, with the ceiling fan blowing on high-wind. It’s completely silent besides the clanking of the fan chains violently dangling. The half-furnished room is lit by one lamp that sat in the corner on the highboy. My face in my hands, I weep and sob, overburdened with shame and guilt, questioning myself and my purpose. “What am I even doing with my life? Should I even be in Chicago? Am I going to feel this way forever?” Simultaneously, I am impressed by my own investment in the concept of pattern-repetition. Haven’t I worked on this already? I’ve certainly been here before. I hear the voice of my therapist asking, “what does your inner child need?” but I don’t have the emotional energy to go there. The compassionate part of myself reminds me to be gentle and acknowledge that healing is not linear, and that I will find acceptance and resolve in time. The wounded-healer in me is not quite ready for this conversation and would rather stew in the peril. 

At this moment, I recall a retreat that I had attended with friends and mentors in December of 2019 in North Carolina. One day on the retreat, we discussed the concepts of shame and guilt in a socratic circle with about one hundred people sitting on the floor of the large meeting room. It was essentially an open forum, though it had several people guiding and mediating the general conversation. One man stood up in the room and said, “I just feel worthless. People rely on me, sure, but I can’t help but feel like I make no impact. I have no purpose here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m  lost.” A mediator looks at him and says to the room, “Everybody who has ever felt purposeless, please raise your hand.” My hand naturally rises, and with my head on a swivel, I notice that all one hundred-or-so people in the room also had raised their hands. The man began weeping as the mediator said, “every single person in this room has felt this way at least once in their lives. It is critical that we meet our hopelessness with gentleness and compassion. Welcome it, greet it, and ask what it needs to be heard, seen, and felt.” From here on, I would commit to a never-ending meet and greet with all of the enmeshed parts of myself.

Chicago, IL - June 2022

Chicago, IL - June 2022

I met up with my previous downstairs neighbor for dinner. Merely acquaintances at this moment in time, though dear friends today, we went out for Tibetan Momo’s and sat in the window seat. He ordered the fish, which I thought was a bold choice for somebody who was seemingly unexcited and even skeptical of my restaurant recommendation in the first place. Over our dumplings and mango lassis, he explained that he was in the process of some major relationship shifts, as well, and expressed fear that it would end in divorce (and after some time, it did indeed end in divorce). I shared of my recent relationship’s closing, my own skepticism and mishandling of the healing journey, and how I was yearning to build community amidst this major life shift. “Maybe I’ll even return to photography” I joked (but then I actually did). At this point in time, I had isolated myself from many of my friends and family, and I was overwhelmed with nervousness and fear of rejection by reemerging into community. I felt like I didn’t deserve it. “My art just really doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t come from anywhere. People probably aren’t going to like me very much. Aren’t I just a little annoying? I know how I am.” I explained that I am trying very hard to not get familiar with feeling this way. “Nip it in the bud” as my mother says. 

After several months of sitting on my wooden floor with the ceiling fan blowing on high-wind, sobbing, eureka moments began to sporadically occur. Little moments of peace would wash over me as I continued to “lean in.” Every month, week, and then every day began to become lighter and easier to carry. I started listening to Gil Fronsdal’s Dharma Talks on Audio Dharma, a program that an old friend had shown me years prior. I started to practice looking at myself in the mirror and saying, “I love you” over and over again, until it started to mean something. Until I could look into my own eyes and see myself as a child worthy of nurturing, care, and ultimately love. Part of myself was lightly embarrassed over this. I would stand there and laugh, saying out loud, “do you think the doctors at work do this shit? Probably not.” But it works for me, so why not?

Chicago, IL - May 2022

Swannanoa, NC - March 2022

In thinking back to my previous relationship, I think of the times that each of us fought so deftly to be seen and heard by one another. I remember her once telling me, “what the two of us are fighting for should not be this hard.” At the moment, this made me angry and ultimately sad. I really was not in a space to be able to access my vulnerability in order to hear or process this, and was hardly able to reflect on what this actually meant. In time, I discovered how my frustration here was a direct result of my fear of losing the relationship, and ultimately the fear of rejection. I didn’t want to lose this little life we’d built together, but I also didn’t want to wake up and smell the coffee of what was actually occurring. Little did I know at the time, the rejection wasn’t really coming from my partner, it was just coming from myself. My friend Gareth told me, “fear and anger are closely related. If you can find out what you are angry about, you can find out what you’re afraid of. And if you can find out what you’re afraid of, it will tell you what you love.” I’ll be meditating on this one for years, but it rings true. 

In my reflection, I have found that I was angry because I was afraid of my own powerlessness, and I was afraid of the lies that I was telling myself: I am fundamentally unlovable; I will never be happy; I deserve to feel unhappy and dissatisfied. I was afraid because she was calling on me to face a truth that I was not ready to admit: that this just wasn’t going to work. When we admit things, it makes it “real.” And when it becomes real, we have to make change. In her book “All About Love,” bell hooks tells us that 

“The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be… More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling.”

It is in this truth telling that we are able to reify the love that exists within our relationships, whether that be with ourselves, platonic, romantic, or on a wider scale in the context of the world as we know it. It is in truth telling that we are able to lean into the essence of freedom, because it is this honesty that allows this river to flow to begin with. 

In catching up with an old friend a year or so after the breakup, I learned that shortly after everything had happened, my previous partner had seemingly moved back down south and moved in with a “new” guy. They got engaged on an airplane. She told me that she and my friends had agreed to not tell me for some time because they knew that I wasn’t initially doing well, and they wanted to give me some time. “Evan, it happened really fast.” Truthfully, I laughed out loud, a little bit in disbelief as we used to make fun of people who would “U-haul” together, but mostly in sheer, unabashed relief. I’m not the type to go back and look at my ex’s social media profiles, so I was genuinely disconnected from her after our parting until I received this information. I didn’t even care if she had cheated on me. At this point, I’ve accepted that I’ll just never have an answer to that question. I was mostly just surprised that I felt happy to hear she had taken what she needed and had gotten the hell out of Dodge. For her sake, but most importantly, for mine. 

With that information, I have ultimately concluded that our relationship did not end with a lack of love. It is absolutely cliche to say that when you love something, you have to let it go. But for me, this is my truth. As much as I wanted to  do what’s familiar and steep myself in the overwhelming feeling of both internal and external rejection, I had to realize and embody the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around me. We’re all out here just trying to get by with the tools that we have, and sometimes that just doesn’t look the way I want it to. 

Today, I carry these lessons with me. Here, there is no love lost. Only a love radically reimagined, bestowed, and carried.

Highlands, NC - March 2022

Highlands, NC  - March 2022

Asheville, NC - March 2022

Last year, I got some old film developed and was revealed photographs from another time, when I felt small and felt as if I deserved very little. Most of these sat undeveloped in a camera bag in a closet for about a year and a half. There have been times when I’ve revisited work that I’ve had distance from, but this felt more haunting. Hundreds of photographs that brought me to a place that today feels so far away. I can point to Andrea Gibson who said, “for the worriers: the future was always the worst and the future never came.” As a worry wart, I feel that, and I can attest that the future never came. Today, I am incredibly happy to have a community of caring, compassionate, and widely talented friends who have helped me to regain my will to live. Not just survive, but truly live. It is their encouragement, support, and endless cheer that has made Hopefulessness possible. I am infinitely grateful to begin sharing my stories, photographs, and thoughts with all of you. In these stories of trials and tribulations, pride and humility, and longing and suffering, I hope that we are able to find understanding in one another in a way that we haven’t before. ~ Evan