3: How to Hope in the Hopeless

I was born as a relatively normal kid on the North Side of Chicago. In other words, I was born a Cubs fan.

It hasn’t been easy staying a Cubs fan. I would never have switched teams, especially not for my ingrained territorial rival, The White Sox. No, once you’re a Cubs fan, you will always be a Cubs fan. But I did give up on the Cubs, as so many young kids -- and not-so-young kids -- like me probably did. After I’d felt sure that they were going to win in 2008, on the one hundredth anniversary of “not winning”, only to be disappointed yet again, I threw in my baseball cap and walked away. I stopped caring about the sport, though in the back of my heart, I never stopped caring about the Cubs and would always defend them, no matter how hopeless they seemed.

Since I finished my first diary at the age of 9, not once have I stopped writing. But there have been moments when I doubted my writing. I’ve gone through periods where I stopped writing seriously and was only able to scribble occasional diaries entries while exercising my hand on assigned essays. But I never let go of the belief that I would someday write novels, as I’d always dreamed. I can’t tell you why, but no matter how unlikely it seemed at times, I never gave up my conviction.

Just as Cubs fans never gave up on their team.

I’ll admit it -- I had given up. I didn’t believe that the Cubs would finally win the World Series after their record streak of failure, until I checked the score on my phone this morning. And heard the news on the radio over breakfast. And watched the game highlights on YouTube. And opened Facebook to see a stream of countless reactions to the historic win.

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a novel. After a frustrating summer of writer’s block, the mood suddenly hit me, and I have been pounding out chapters at the rate Apple produces new iPhones. I have no idea how it happened, but all of a sudden -- I became a writer again. Similarly, I have no idea how my cursed and wonderful team finally pulled it together enough to win, but they did.

All I can be sure of now is the exhilaration I feel bursting inside each moment I discover a new twist in the story I’m developing and every time I remember that last strike out, the moment when they finally won. And now I can believe the impossible. Because before today, there really was nothing more impossible than the Cubs winning the World Series.

So you should know that no matter where you are in your life, it is never impossible to be a writer, to finish that book, to continue your story. We can continue to send our dreams into typhoons or sewers, down alleyways and into Cleveland, into places where only our strong beliefs can help them survive. We should acknowledge that every impossibility is only an improbability. We must take hope in the hopeless.

And finally, we can celebrate for the Cubs.

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