Introducing… the Hope in Humanity Digest

🌱Perhaps it’s the budding flowers and the scent of spring going to my head, but I have decided it’s time for a bit of a change… 

When I was about sixteen, I first experienced “anxiety.” At night, lying in bed, my forehead would tingle uncontrollably as though ants were crawling all over my skin.

I would thrust my arm over my head each night to push the panic down until sleep could rescue me. It was the first time I saw a therapist, and it was the year I concluded that God was a dream I no longer dreamed. I knocked around in a suddenly godless world looking for purpose: “a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope.”* (*Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist)

I tried on hyper-achievement: first Stanford then tech, where I was sharp, successful, & restless.

An aching pain settled in behind my shoulder blades, & I began to have strange nervous ticks that contorted the whole left side of my face. 

My dad came down for a weekend — he helped me find a psychiatrist; and I got botox injected into my face to freeze the ticks: I look back on photos from that time and squirm at my strangely frozen, Cindy-Lou-Who-like smile. 

When I left tech, I believed my playful childhood outlet —and perhaps my becoming a famous artist and songwriter!!- would finally cut through the darkness. Funnily enough, trying to “make it” in music drew as much darkness as writing songs created light. 

I scrambled through multiple part-time jobs, finding tutoring (🫶), writing music and essays, making videos for social media, and reading fiction once more! Slowly but surely, I was dancing, singing for fun, and skipping like a child. My joy was back!!

In the wake of heartbreak, I found myself curled up in bed reading the Book of Joy to buoy me from despair. Something clicked when the Dalai Lama explained that joy is not just happiness, but a “more empathetic, more empowered, even more spiritual state of mind.” 

Through it all, I have realized that the common threads of friendship, music, literature, and writing nourish my spirit.

In Darwin's words, these habits “develop my empathic imagination,**” and create, in the Dalai Lama’s words, an empathetic, empowered state of joy. 

As he lay on his deathbed, Darwin regretted how he lost touch with poetry and music.

“He saw, from the wistful vantage of nearing the void, how `the loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.’” (**from Maria Popova’s essay here)

How striking: a loss of these tastes—for music, poetry, and fiction—is a loss of happiness.

It's no wonder that a kind of oppressive bleakness haunts our political and digital landscapes in a world that hardly encourages poetry, music, or writing.

I find so much purpose and joy in cultivating hope. My deep sensitivity to pain and proclivity for depression necessitated it: I found music to decorate my days, books that warmed my nights, and ideas that inspired me to choose optimism over despair.

All of this has inspired me to start something I’m calling my “Hope in Humanity” Digest, a collection of seeds—books, music, ideas, and stories—that make me want to stick around and keep fighting for a more hopeful future. 

Sign up now or stick around to get seeds of hope delivered to your inbox every other Wednesday.

Here’s to having hope, 

Halpal ❤️

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20 songs in 22 days — what a whirlwind!