What it Means to Have Hope
Hope. What does it mean to you? Hope is defined as a feeling of expectation or desire for a certain thing to happen. It is an optimistic state of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes that surrounds one’s life.
Before coming to Narconon, I found myself without the luxury of that optimism nor any reason to expect positive outcomes in my surroundings. In fact, hope that I could change was all I had left, and with that came the desire to not only lift myself out of turmoil but to turn my life around to better myself as well as to help others to do the same. Having experienced first-hand the negative outcomes that addiction can cause, I found it necessary to find hope for my recovery, and the Narconon program helped me find that hope within myself. Without this new hope, my life surely would have come to a devastating conclusion.
The hope that I had found gave me the foundation I needed to turn my life around and has fueled my ambition to strive toward more achievable goals. In hindsight, looking at the start of my recovery, I can reflect on how distant the thought of achieving my goals for recovery had been. It seemed as though recovery was so far out of my reach that there was no sense of even trying to begin it. In the state of mind I was in, I was presented with only two possible outcomes. One being to either lay down and die having given up on my life, or two, find the hope I needed to start recovering and live my life to the fullest. To me, there was only one option and one outcome that would become my reality, and this reality was recovery. When this reality finally came to pass after months of hospital care and extensive drug rehabilitation at Narconon Suncoast, that which seemed impossible became possible. I credit this to my determination and hard work, none of which would have been possible without the hope provided by the caring staff at Narconon Suncoast.
My hope does not end here though. With this newfound freedom of sobriety, I have opened many new doors to further improve upon my life. I now have hope to repair my past relationships with my family and friends who would have otherwise written me off because of my addiction. I also have hope to improve upon my health and well-being as they have been horribly neglected over the years. Hope to improve upon my financial well-being is also an aspect of my life which has improved since my recovery. I am happy to say that things have started to come together for me in a significantly positive way. I now have open communication with my family in hopes of building back their trust, and my once close-knit group of sober friends I had in the past have been reinserted back into my life. My health has also shown dramatic improvement as I have been able to regain energy and body mass due to eating right and exercising.
“All-in-all it has been a surprising transformation of my life which had been snowballing and spiraling out of control, to once again becoming a constructive member of society again.”
All-in-all it has been a surprising transformation of my life which had been snowballing and spiraling out of control, to once again becoming a constructive member of society again. Hope has been the bedrock and backbone which has made this all possible. Without it I would have been lost.
It is now my hope that I will continue to build upon my goals, reaching out to obtain more and more positive results in the future and one day help others obtain their goals as well. Nothing is ever impossible if you just have hope towards what you wish to accomplish. I have come a long way from where I started, and things can only get better for me from here on out. I hope that this will help others to see that hope is not an illusion and can be a powerful asset to help achieve success in addiction recovery and find bliss and happiness in life. I Hope...
Bobby G.—Narconon Suncoast Graduate
