On hope, winking

Spoilers ahead.

There's a version of hope I've never trusted. The soft, fluffy kind. The poster on the corridor wall with a kitten dangling off a branch and hang in there underneath. When things are genuinely hard, I find that version a little insulting.

When I came to write about hope ( and ‘Control Alter Delete’ is, underneath all the games and the glitter, a book about hope ) I thought about my best friend.

They rhave always been that person I have had to point my head in the right direction when things are at their worst, like a magnet, making it easier to find others along the way to share the load and give me more reasons to hope.

So when I wrote about ‘hope’ they had to be a character who argues back, takes up room, makes demands, and flatly refuses to be switched off, requires love and doesn’t always behave…

There's an old story I've loved for years, since back as a teen when I was OBSESSED with greek myth & legend. Pandora's jar. In it, everything terrible escapes into the world, and one thing stays behind: Hope. And nobody has ever quite agreed on what that means. Was hope saved for us, kept safe when everything else got loose? Or was it trapped away from us, the one thing we can never quite reach? I love that it can be both. These days some days it feels like both before breakfast, that last bit of jam that you can’t reach with your finger, knife or even a makeshift tool made out of the finest cheap, white bread…

I wrote a lot of ‘Control Alter Delete’ during the pandemic, pregnant and officially "vulnerable", (and mad at being called ‘vulnerable’) stuck at home while being more connected to the world than I'd ever been and able to do nothing about any of it… and desperately needing a hug from my bff. That strange mix of hyper-connected and completely powerless taught me something about hope I hadn't understood before. It isn't comforting. It isn't passive. It's heavy, and inconvenient, and sometimes it hurts to carry. You have to choose it, often, and usually when you least feel like it.

That's the hope I wanted readers to meet, and keep hunting. Not a promise that everything will be fine, because I can't make that promise and neither can anyone else. Something sturdier. My character Hal doesn't survive by becoming fearless or by winning cleanly, so wanted to write an ending that isn’t clean because hope is a choice and we have to be dared to grasp it - hope, in the end, is a choice.

I think that's the most useful skill any of us have right now.

If there's one thing I hope a reader takes from this, it isn't a tidy message about resilience. It's permission to be imperfect. To be frightened and keep moving anyway. To let go of the version that’s easy, or doomscrolly; to let go of of things you want too, and reach for the harder, truer , messier reality. Hope isn't the absence of the dark. It's the thing you decide to hold on to while you're standing in it.

I gave hope a body because I wanted young people to know their hope is allowed to be a fighter. Yours can be too.

‘Control Alter Delete’ is out now from Little Tiger. If you'd like me to come and talk to your students about hope, stories and getting through the hard bits, I'm here, along with free resources for the classroom.