If there is an emotion that has caused me more grief over the span of my lifetime than the noxious sentiment of disappointment, I have yet to recognize it. Others may wrestle with regret, guilt, shame, but for me, it is disappointment that reaches out of the mud, squeezes my heart, and drags me down, again and again and again.
What is disappointment? It is what happens when you dream and reality fails to meet it. My fellow reverists are familiar with the awfully sickening sensation that accompanies disappointment, that moment when your mind finally recognizes the mismatch, when you realize that your hopes have yet again been dashed, that despite the beauty and color of what lives in your imagination, the people, places, and situations around you are determined to show up only as a pale shade of their fullest potential, thin veneers with hollowness rattling within.
For the past thirty years, I internalized my disappointment in the world as a problem with me. I was the one who was silly enough to read books that filled my brain with grand ideas. I was the one who was stupid enough to expect the people around me to act with kindness and compassion, to return my generosity in kind. I was the one who was naive enough to believe in romance and infinite possibility despite the darkness around me.
They tell you that to deal with disappointment, all you have to do is mitigate your expectations, keep your feet on the ground, stop floating above the clouds, see people for who they most often are – cynical, self-centered, forgetful, ungrateful, cruel. Over and over again, they tell you to accept the harsh cold of reality and for god’s sake, stop dreaming, child.
But you see, I learned this week that I have long misplaced the nausea that follows disappointment. The word itself comes from the Old French, desapointer, which means to “undo the appointment, remove from office”. Disappointment, then, is not a reflection of the person who dares to dream, the idealist who so easily can see the shape of better relationships, happier communities, loftier societies. No, disappointment, it is a reflection of those who fail to live up to those dreams. The nausea, it belongs to them.
By padding about the concept this week and feeling out this new perspective, I finally learned the trick to dealing with disappointment in a way that neutralizes its effect on my delicate heart. Curling up in bed in the fetal position, allowing the gap between potential and reality to crush the ephemeral spirit of the romantic – this is not the proper response. It does little to solve the actual problem.
No, the appropriate way to deal with disappointment is to remove the source of disillusionment from the pedestal you have put them upon with nothing more than compassionate detachment, to do so knowing that perhaps one day, that person will be capable of rising to the occasion, but accepting the reality that that day is not today, and that that is quite alright.
Us dreamers, we know that that day, it arrives for us all, eventually, eventually. In the meantime, though, we need not let such malady perturb the clarity of our conscience. This would be tantamount to allowing the bastards to grind us down. No, rather than absorbing the failures of others in the pit of our collective stomach, we can instead enjoy our coffee, savor our sweet treats, and cherish the prettiest of our reveries in the richness of protest, swinging tranquilly in the peace we have not only earned but also well, well, well deserved.
Music Corner: A lil grab-bag of what I’ve been listening to these days.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
