For Auld Lang Syne

The Cruel Optimism of Second Chances

Happy New Year.

I hope 2026 finds you happy, healthy, and making plans of epic proportion. There’s that word again, woven through everything this time of year—hope. I still believe in hope, but I’ve learned it carries more weight when tethered to something sturdier than the calendar. Not to a date we agree to celebrate together, but to memory, choice, and the deeper work of participation. This is the first year I intend to meet with intention. It’s taken a long time to get here.

New beginnings and second chances are often offered as gifts. But after you’ve accepted enough of them, they start to feel conditional. Hope no longer feels light. It becomes something you hold carefully, knowing how easily it can slip through your hands.

There was a time when every fresh start felt like a reprieve—a chance to be spared what had already happened. Back then, optimism arrived fast and bright, unbound by memory, asking very little of me except belief. That’s the cruel optimism of addiction: the promise that the future will fix what the past has broken, if only you hope hard enough.

Addiction takes many things, but relationships are among its most reliable casualties. They don’t always end in a single rupture. More often, they erode—worn thin by disappointment, mistrust, and the quiet arithmetic of promises made and broken. What lingers isn’t just grief but a longing to be restored to a life that once seemed possible, with another person still in it.

When Dean calls me in rehab, hope arrives all at once—bright, immediate, like it’s been waiting for its cue.

“Dean!” I can’t believe it. My heart flutters like it’s never been broken.

“So, you’re in rehab, huh?” He makes it sound like an exotic island. “How are you doing?”

“I’m doing great! I had no idea it was possible to feel this good.”

“I’m coming to see you,” he says.

I fight back a whoop of delight as possibility absolves him of all the heartache he’s caused me.

“I thought we’d go to Colorado. I have a business opportunity there, and you can teach anywhere.”

Yes, I can. My heart soars. He’s giving me another chance. I can teach anywhere.

“Colorado, huh?” He could have said the moon for all I care, as long as I can be with him.

“We’ll drive up together and check it out. How’s that sound?”

I envision tree-lined streets and sprawling lawns. We’ll have two dogs and a pool. Ours will be the house where all the kids hang out.

“That sounds incredible!” I can hardly contain my joy.

I can still have it all.

I don’t know it then, but the hope I feel in that moment is doing more than lifting me forward—it’s reaching back, quietly asking me not to look too closely. It asks me to mistake intensity for change, imagination for evidence. This is how second chances work when addiction is still in the room: they arrive radiant, generous, full of future, and ask only one thing in return—that you forget what you already know. The cruelty isn’t that they fail. It’s that they feel like proof while they’re happening. And so you believe. Not because you’re naïve, but because believing feels better than standing alone with the truth that love, by itself, has never been enough.

There would be other second chances after that one—more than I could imagine at the time. Some will arrive bright and convincing. Most will fail in familiar ways. Hope alone was never enough to carry me from powerlessness to something like agency—but it isn’t meaningless either. It’s a bridge, even when it leads nowhere. It keeps me moving long enough to learn what movement actually requires.

Now, when a new year arrives, I still feel the pull of beginnings. I still make plans. I still hope. But that hope no longer floats free of memory or responsibility. It’s tethered—to what I know, to what I choose, to the fact that participation matters more than timing.

We sing Auld Lang Syne as if it’s a song about forgetting, but it isn’t. It’s a song about carrying what came before without pretending it didn’t shape us. About holding the past close enough to recognize it, and far enough away not to be ruled by it.

I still believe in beginnings. I just don’t ask them to save me anymore.
For auld lang syne, that’s enough.