Respair: the old word for hope coming back

The best quotes aren't always sentences. Sometimes they're a single word you didn't know you'd been missing.

That's how it landed when Jesmyn Ward's essay collection On Witness and Respair came out this spring. Ward is a two-time National Book Award winner. She's also a woman who lost the father of her children on the eve of the pandemic and kept mothering, kept writing, through the worst of it. Her new book takes its name from a word most of us have never heard: respair.

Respair is an old English word that mostly fell out of use centuries ago. It means fresh hope. A return from despair. It's the exact opposite of the word that's probably lived in your mouth all along.

Ward didn't invent it. She went looking for language during her hardest years and pulled respair back out of the dictionary. Then she wrote a whole book around it and handed the word to the rest of us.

Why one word can do so much

You don't always need a whole essay. When it's a hard week, a whole paragraph is too much to hold. One clean word can slip through the door when nothing else can.

Respair names something you've probably felt but never had a label for. The very first crack of light after a long dark spell. Not a fix. Not a solution. Just the return of hope, quietly, sometimes without permission. Naming a feeling makes it easier to notice when it shows up. And this one shows up more than you think.

There's something else worth saying. Ward didn't manufacture respair, she witnessed it. She named it out loud so other women could recognize it in their own days. That's what women's writing has always done for us. It brings the invisible into the light so we can hold it.

Something small to try today

Write respair somewhere quiet. A sticky note on your bathroom mirror. The inside cover of your notebook. The notes app on your phone. Not because you're in despair right now, maybe you're not, but so it's already waiting the next time you need it.

When a hard week comes, and it will, you'll have a word to reach for. And a woman who put it there for you.

Quote to sit with:

"I knew next to nothing, and I was searching for art that could help me understand what I was living through." — Jesmyn Ward

💌 Sarah