Bhid-ei

I’m struggling with disappointment at the moment.

 Yes, I know. Deal with it, right?

 That’s obviously what I am going to do. I don’t walk around perpetually disappointed all the time. I’m just talking about right now. I checked my emails when I was making first breakfast, which was a mistake, and I didn’t see the answer that I was hoping for, and now I’m at my computer trying to write about something other than how I am feeling, and it’s not going to work. I’m also tired because I am upset about another apparently unsolvable issue that has been on my mind for over a year, and another that has been affecting me for fifteen years, and that keeps me up at night sometimes.

When I lay it out like that, the first issue pales to near invisibility; it is something that I can deal with to the best of my ability, and if I can’t have what I have asked for, I can accept.

The third issue is utterly hopeless. I have said and done everything that I can think of, many times, to no avail. It’s a grand tragedy playing out on a stage, but although I’ve made my way to the door, something always prevents me from leaving the theatre. I guess I’m hoping that the show will get better, that this is just a chapter that nears it’s end, and not how the whole story goes, that I’ll have the chance to say what I need to when he is able to hear me. I hold hope for that partly because here, at the back door with my hand on the latch, I am also on a stage, playing for the missing, playing my heart out in the hopes that they’ll give the show another look.

I’m not as stoic as I want to be. I can pick myself up and move forward as well as anyone, I suppose, I’ve had lots of practice, but I’m still pretty invested in my vision of how things should be, and it causes me stress. It’s hard to accept things that seem so fundamentally wrong that it will change who you are to do so. Do I want to be the kind of person that abandons hope? I have a low opinion of hope anyway, but there doesn’t seem to be another word that fits what I so desperately need to feel right now. Faith, maybe, if you can remove any religious connotations from the word, is probably closest.

 Or maybe it’s perfect.

 I haven’t found too many words that are pre-Latin, but the roots of faith are. Bhid-ei is a word from the Indo-European verbal base language meaning trust, entrust. This, apparently leads to our more recent Latin fides, meaning trust, guarantee, proof, sincerity, loyalty, belief.

 It’s hard to believe, it’s hard to be sincere, it’s hard to trust, it’s hard to be loyal, and it’s hard to prove that you are. All of these things take a lot of time and work to establish, especially after any of then have been broken, and it requires a lot of courage, both to endure, and to face the possibility that you might never get it back; you might have to accept the unacceptable. You might be wrong.

 Whatever you have to do, do it valiantly.