JAMES DASHNER
HOPE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD.
That’s the first thing that popped into my head as I sat down to write. I’m sitting by the ocean in the city of Perth, Western Australia. For a kid who grew up in relatively (my goodness, that word, it means so much in the context of our topic) humble circumstances in a small town in Georgia, that statement seems outrageous. Australia barely registered as an actual, physical place to a kid like that—a kid whose biggest adventures in life consisted of trips to visit Grandma in South Carolina. Never, not once, did I dream that someday I might visit Australia, much less go there in the capacity of an author, to sign books for people who had been so nice as to read the stories I wrote.
But I’m here. I’m in Australia. By the Indian Ocean, an ocean that I thought might’ve been made up by rascally explorers after a few drinks on their rickety wooden ship. And tomorrow I’ll be signing books for “fans.” In Australia.
I know what this sounds like. Humble bragging. I hate humble bragging as much as you, and I’m probably guilty. But I have a point. Deep inside me, deep within the hidden compartments of a complicated human being, I have a point that I hope to make to you, the reader. And how appropriate. There’s that word again. Hope. The four-letter beast that is ever present above us, flapping its scaly, venous, gigantic wings, daring us to take flight upon its back even as its hideous, hot breath warns us to stay away.
Hope.
Here’s where I become brutally honest. I’m a white heterosexual male, raised in the good ole U.S. of A., by a family that loved me, parents who cared, in a stable home with both heat and air-conditioning. I can’t remember a single time in my entire existence where I felt true hunger, despite the shameful tendency we have as relatively (that word again) stable Americans to say “I’m starving” when we’ve gone half a day without a solid processed meal. I’ve never been beaten. I’ve never been assaulted in any way. I’ve never been thrown in jail, deservingly or not. I’ve never been the victim of even the slightest racial discrimination, and I’ve surely been the beneficiary of racial preference many times without realizing it. I’ve never been paid less than someone else because of my gender. I’ve never had to deal with any kind of gender or sexual orientation discrimination.
What’s my point?
My point is this: that I’m the first to admit I’ve had an incredibly easy life, especially when compared with the vast majority of others out there in the world. I can’t pretend to understand things that I don’t understand. I haven’t been in the shoes of many of you. I can’t ever bring myself to utter the words “I understand.” Because I don’t. Life is so sickeningly unfair and I often wonder why—even feel shame about—the fact that I was born into the “easy” life. But I was. And I do try to understand. This I can say with complete honesty. Since becoming published, I’ve become friends with a much more diverse group of people, and I’ve met thousands of readers from all over the world. I’ve learned and grown tremendously as a person from these encounters, and my view of life and all its inherent cruelties has changed completely.
But again, what is my point? Really?
Let me keep trying to make one. Stay with me.
It’s hope. I called it a four-letter word, but I didn’t say it was bad. Hope is the one thing that life is about, in my opinion. Hope for a better world, hope for a better humanity, hope for a life in which each and every single person is accepted and loved, with absolutely zero exceptions. Hope for the end of hunger, the end of thirst, the end of abuse. Not for the end of pain—because hey, buddy, the world will always have pain—but the end of unnecessary pain. Pain that’s inflicted merely by where you’re born and the stuff of which you’re made.
When I was a kid, I didn’t really hear about any of this heavy stuff, much less understand it (and this was long before the age of social media, through which my own children do know about these issues). I was a kid, for crying out loud. A simple little kid who thought about simple things. I loved baseball. I loved movies. I loved going out in the woods and pretending to be things I wasn’t, acting out entire stories, getting them out of my head and into the world—even if they were seen only by me and the animals lurking in the trees and under the bushes and pine straw. I was a nerd, a dork, a dweeb. A big fella named Ian pushed me into the urinals at school. Another kid, with unnaturally large shoulder muscles and a mullet the likes of which any eighties hair band would’ve died for, said mean things to me every day for no reason I can think of other than that he randomly chose me to verbally abuse and not someone else.
I liked girls who didn’t like me back. I rooted for teams that didn’t win. I wanted to buy shoes and jeans that my parents couldn’t afford. I had a classmate who received a brand-new Corvette when he turned sixteen, as spoiled as any child I’ve ever known. I think I got a new shirt. In the compact world of my kid-hood, I was jealous of him. I had no capacity to understand that I should just be grateful I had clean, fresh water coming bountifully out of taps whenever I expended the small effort of turning a silvery, fingerprint-smeared knob. That I had food. That I had shelter. That I had family. That I was getting an education.
A wise therapist might ask of me, “How does this make you feel?”
It makes me feel like a tornado. A swirling, spinning jumble of thoughts and feelings that only serve to confuse my simple mind and heart. I feel in equal parts lucky and guilty. Relieved and ashamed. Smart and stupid. In some ways, the whole foundation of my existence has turned from stone to sand.
But there is one shining beacon in all of that confusion.
Hope.
I don’t care who I am or what I was. What my circumstances were. Where I was born and into what I was born. I do know that at times I felt hope, and it’s the one thing I felt that has not tarnished or changed or disappeared. Somewhat even beyond my own awareness, hope burned inside my chest, and it’s what I held on to. Hope for what? I’m not even sure. I’m not sure I need an answer, if any of us need an answer. Hope is its own thing, its own entity, its own power. HOPE, all capital letters. As a child, I felt hope; as a newly awakened adult, I felt hope; as a middle-aged man currently, I feel hope.
There is one way in which I think I can define this elusive concept. I believe that much of my hope is made up of this ideal: that our lives take a course in which they someday serve a purpose. I honestly and truly believe that no matter your circumstances, your life experiences can someday lead to achieving a Great Purpose, caps intended, even though our own personal definitions of Great can vary drastically. Also, the vast, vast majority of these Great Purposes will be on an intimate level that only a few will ever understand or appreciate. But that doesn’t make them any less important, any less grand in the schemes of the universe.
I think about my family, both the many who came before and the few who (so far) have come after. Not everyone is born into a loving family, but I was, and I’m eternally grateful for that. Because of this, my family is everything to me. Everything. My parents, my siblings, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My wife and children. They are why I exist and why I wake up every morning. Someone wise once told me that the amount you love another person is directly proportional to the amount of pain you can feel when bad things happen to them. I’ve had such pain.
My grandpa died when I was in high school, one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. Shortly thereafter, my very young cousin died in a terrible tragedy. My dad died at the age of fifty-six, and I was only twenty-five. Way too soon. My grandma passing a few years later was a toughie. There was another cousin who died as a child, and then another in her prime. These cousins might as well have been siblings, we were so close.
Death. I’m not unique in having to attend so many funerals, and I know that. But in my life, death has been the biggest source of pain I can imagine (other than a very personal story that is far too intimate to share in this essay). I hate death, and I want someone to hurry up and figure out that whole immortality thing I’ve been reading about in science fiction books my whole life. Come on, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson—anyone, get on it!
But death is a funny thing. Not ha-ha slap-your-knee funny (though sometimes pain can make us do outrageous, inexplicable things), but the kind of funny that means unexpected consequences. With each of the deaths mentioned above, I felt an incredible closeness to those who’d passed and those who were still sticking around. As spiritual an experience as I could ever describe. A power that burned inside me, matching the pain stroke for stroke. And that power was some magical combination of love and hope. As odd as it sounds, the funerals I’ve attended for these dear people have been among the highlights of my life, memories more precious than all the gold and silver in the world. We had no choice but to do it and to hurt from it. But paying our respects, sharing stories, remembering, being together, united in pain . . . I always left a better person than I had been when I arrived.
Family is about hope. Family is hope. I honestly don’t have the slightest clue if that’s true for everyone (though I suspect it is), but it’s true for me, and no essay on the subject could omit them. I have four kids, and all the hope and love that has been bequeathed to me must go to them. They really are the most important, if not sole, purpose of my life now. My success as an author means absolutely nothing if I fail as a parent.
But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, does it? Because the second thing that really popped into my head when I thought about this subject was my readers. The amount of hope and friendship I’ve derived from them is beyond measurement. It’s been such a great two-way street, a mutually beneficial relationship that I’m grateful for each and every day. I wrote a few stories that allow them to escape the hardships and drudgeries of life for snippets of time here and there, and they provide me with a constant, steady flow of inspiring tales and laugh-out-loud comments. What a fantastically pleasant surprise this two-way street has been for me.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But as a snotty-nosed kid it was more like a pipe dream, like wishing to be an NFL quarterback or an astronaut. Possible, surely, but very unlikely. When I doubled down and got serious in college with my writing, I had some delusions of grandeur (as Han Solo would say). I thought I had to create a masterpiece, something “important,” a book that would win every award and get me an open invitation to Oprah’s house. That didn’t work so well for me. It’s not who I am. I finally went with what I love to read myself and wrote things like The Maze Runner, action and mystery and science fiction. I thought to myself (and I’m not kidding here), Oh well, I’ll never be an “important” writer and change any lives, but I’m having a lot of fun.
It shames me how completely I underestimated the power of storytelling, especially after living an entire childhood in which storytelling affected my life more profoundly than anything else. Getting lost in a story, any story, does change a person. It binds us to characters, makes us feel their emotions and see our own life through a different lens, prepares us for things we may not see coming. Perhaps more than anything else, it simply allows us to escape to another world when our own is too difficult to face for a moment. Maybe many moments.
And these are the stories I’ve heard from readers, stories that have buoyed up my life in countless ways. One new friend had cancer and bonded with one of my characters, pulled from their strength on the page, to get through the terrifying treatments. Others have been bullied or had emotional problems or a mental illness or contemplated suicide and found a safe haven within another world, those created by myself and by many of my author friends. We swap these tales and feel uplifted and enlightened, humbled and inspired. I can say with complete honesty that my readers out there have touched me in much greater ways than I’ve ever touched them.
What does that sound like to me? That sounds like hope. HOPE, all caps.
So again, even now, I’m asking this question: What is my point? I admit this essay has mostly been a stream of consciousness, done purposefully without much planning. (Hey, knock it off. I know you’re laughing and saying, Yeah, we can tell.) I was asked to write about hope, and I did so, trying my best to transfer my thoughts onto the page, translate the things that four-letter word ignited within my mind.
I guess this is how I would sum it up: I’m so self-conscious about living what most would view as a privileged life (again, white heterosexual male raised by a humble but financially stable family) that I became uncertain about whether I was allowed to feel hope. I thought feeling hope might even come across as an insult to those living much harder lives than I do. How dare I talk about hope when I live a nice, neat little life inside my nice, neat little shell. And in many ways, that assessment is correct, and I’m guilty as charged. When there are countless people out there hoping for water, food, or a friend who truly accepts them, the things I’ve hoped for seem trite and borderline offensive.
But I am who I am. I can only promise that I’ve done my best to “pay it forward,” to help those less fortunate, and to make every stride possible to understand things I didn’t as a child. But like any writer and most people, I still think I kinda suck at it and need to do much, much better. Isn’t that a problem we have on any and all levels? I suck. There are a million ways to say it, but we all feel it.
And that’s where HOPE comes in. It’s one of the few things I truly believe we can all share in this world, no matter our makeup or status or place of birth. As I’ve shown, it makes me think of family, both past and future generations, and the strength and love I’ve shared with readers through my stories and travels. It makes me think of working hard to change the world, no matter how small the way in which we do it. It probably makes you think of something in your own life that I’ve never even thought of. But the concept is the same. And that’s my sincere message—my point, perhaps—to anyone out there who might be reading this.
You are not small. You are not insignificant. You are not unworthy. (I can think of another couple of four-letter words to describe anyone who ever tries to make you think so.)
You are great. You are magnificent. You are infinitely important to this world and to the people who come across your path. You are worthy of great things. You are capable of changing as many lives as you so choose, including your own, for the better. There is literally nothing about you, not one thing under the sun, that makes you less than anyone else. If life is rotten, then go and find those people who will accept you and love you and join your quest to change the world. I promise you they’re out there.
Feel hope, my friend, whatever that means to you.
Embrace it, devour it, foster it, make it grow.
Do so, and you will have touched our planet and the people who walk upon it in a way that the eons of infinite time can never erase. You’d be forgiven for thinking I went a little crazy on the cheesy train here at the end, but it’s something I truly feel. Consider yourself hugged by this page of the book, with all the sincerity I can muster.
So go and HOPE the world into submission. And just make sure you have fun while doing it.