What a Raunchy Satire Taught Me About Advent

Welcome to Heretic Hereafter Advent: a week late and a little profane.

Photo by Max Beck on Unsplash

“Hope is for idiots.”

-Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble

We’re just over a week into Advent, the liturgical season before Christmas. One of the Advent traditions is an Advent wreath, with five candles representing peace, hope, joy, love, and Christ. (I love that shit.) The season may be full of frantic attempts at merriness, but its encroaching darkness (hello 4:18pm sunset) draws me toward contemplation. Writing this Substack has given the season a new valence—it’s not enough for me to sleepwalk through the ritual candle lighting anymore. I need to reexamine peace, hope, joy, and love, to sift the gold from the dross. As I lit candle #2 and pondered what to tell my kids about hope, I realized that hope hasn’t always been a benevolent force in my life.

For most of my life I have numbed my anxiety with an absurd hope. I have veered from regular hope to magical thinking. This form of dissociation is often the result of childhood trauma. The idea is that children can become so overwhelmed by an event that the only way to recover is to invent a story. A little girl falls out of a window and afterward tells everyone her imaginary friend flew her to safety. For me, it was the secret belief that my life followed the rules of a sitcom. I studied TV tropes so intently that I had a hard time distinguishing between laughtrack and reality. Whenever my friends were whispering, I was sure they must be planning a surprise party.

I’m embarrassed to admit this “life as sitcom” idea stuck with me well into my thirties. Whenever I felt lonely, forgotten, or mistreated, I reassured myself that whatever I was experiencing was just the dark point before I reached my sitcom happy ending. In the face of depression or my loved ones’ substance use disorder, when I was broke and living in a British slum, I always had hope that things would turn around. Hope was a rubber band I tried to shoot from my fingers—sometimes it propelled me forward, sometimes it trapped me in its rubbery grip.

Perhaps we can blame religion for this (I love that shit almost as much as candles!) Christianity is soaked in miracles. Studies have shown that religious children have a harder time distinguishing fantasy from reality. And why shouldn’t that be? Santa Claus isn’t real, but an invisible god who weighs our sins is? My schoolteacher said that whales ate krill, but my Sunday school teacher insisted they could also swallow prophets whole. It was only once I reached college that I learned that Biblical scholars treat the book as literature (as opposed to history or science.) By then I had decades of cognitive dissonance under my belt.

Concerns about Biblical literalism and whale anatomy aside, Jesus himself said, “ask, seek, knock.” The Bible promises over and over that God will give us what we need. In my experience, Christians are quick to credit God for the good (be it cancer in remission or a good parking spot) while omitting God’s potential role in their misfortunes (a cracked windshield, getting cancer in the first place.) As for myself, I’ve spent years fasting and praying and behaving well in hopes that God would heal my family from substance use disorder but it hasn’t happened. Not yet.

And that “yet” is part of the problem. That “yet” keeps me trapped in ambiguous grief. This differs from grief following a death, because the person you are mourning is still alive, and so there is hope. Ambiguous grief often follows the four D’s: divorce, diagnosis, disclosure, and death of a relationship. Maybe your boyfriend dumped you, maybe your mom gets dementia, maybe you discovered your sibling was living a lie, maybe your ex disappears.

I didn’t start reading Fleishman is in Trouble to learn about hope. I did it because I’m one of those pretentious people who must read the book before binging the TV show. Fleishman is a newly divorced dad and liver doctor whose ex-wife disappears without warning. The book threads the needle between wry social satire (imagine a world where doctors earning $300k are considered bums) and a deeply felt meditation on ambiguous grief. (Also there are a lot of jokes about sexting.) I couldn’t help but notice how often the word “hope” pops up in the book. Hope is most often associated with idiocy, but there is also hope as empowerment, or as a sustaining force, like in this passage:

I once asked him if the worst part of his job was telling people that their loved ones were dead. Yes, that was bad, of course, he told me. But it was nowhere near as awful as telling them that they or their family were sick. Dead was a diagnosis, and it was definitive…illness was a vast chasm of maybe. The patient and anyone who loved and needed the patient felt desperate, and there was a temptation to use your power as a doctor to make everything okay, or to allude to a future okayness of everything…That was ethically okay, to provide hope, but it was not the right thing to do. The right thing to do was to consider how much hope you allowed the people involved. You knew that having hope might help. It would help in their stress levels, it would help them function throughout treatment. But you had to titrate it right, because how much hope should a person have in a situation that was somewhat hopeless?

-Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble

Fleishman taught me hope is a drug. A little hope, wisely administered, can keep you from sinking into despair. But hope is also something you can overdose on, dulling the senses and leaving you stupid. The book echoed what my therapist has been trying to teach me about setting realistic expectations. And by “realistic” she means low. If I envision an upcoming vacation through Hallmark-tinted glasses, imagining my kids enthralled by museums and devouring foreign food, I will be disappointed. If I expect a family vacation to be rife with the usual temper tantrums and at least one planned excursion to totally flop, I can take it in stride when we spend $100 for our family to visit the Tower of London and the kids spend the whole time whining about how bored they are.

Titrating hope means I stop ruminating on what might happen and work towards accepting what is currently happening. Acceptance is what pulls me out of my ambiguous grief and frees me to see what is good about life now. Do I still pray for a miracle when I’m on hold with Ticketmaster’s customer service line? Hell yeah! But I no longer expect miracles. Things may change for the better, or they may not. Either way, I know now that I will get through it.

Journal/Discussion Prompts:

• What role does hope play in your life?

• Is hope the opposite of admitting powerlessness? How can you balance hope while knowing you can’t control the outcomes of certain events?

• What is the wackiest thing you have ever hoped for? Bonus points if it’s Christmas-related.