We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope- Martin Luther King Jr.
Disappointment is common to everyone of us. At some point we’ve felt let down by people and vice versa. Look no further if you grew up in an African home, at some point you will probably be called a disappointment.
Our responses are then orchestrated to either avoid everything and anyone that may make us seem a disappointment, or in rebellion, live up to it.
I think the fundamental question to raise is from where does disappointment come? If I daresay, from expectations, it has the same basis as comparison. However, the most gruesome disappointments are the ones that start internally, where the life force is us. With others, we can sometimes afford to let them down especially when the choice boils down to being happy or pleasing others while we become unhappy. When the option is between our expectations and ourselves, the choice becomes harder because mostly, we find it hard to detach ourselves from our expectations.
It gets even more complex when the choice is between ourselves and people we deeply care about because their expectations of us are also our expectations of ourselves and when we hurt them by letting them down, we hurt even more deeply; that more often than not, we just choose to walk away altogether.
I choose to expand on this latter angle as this is a common dilemma we face in our human interaction, especially in intimate relationships. I think a lot of us don´t take disappointments well because we anchor the idea to the linear thinking of failure and success. So if we do not succeed in meeting an expectation, it must mean that we failed. This is because the world metric doesn´t give room for the tales of failure. Consequently. we forget a possible narrative which is that we can walk from disappointment, that disappointment is a learning ground.
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” so, one can feel disappointment and still be understanding about why the disappointment happened.
I came across the term “relational ambivalence” as propagated by Esther Perel and Mary Alice Miller which seeks to debunk the idea of unconditional love in adult relationships. The idea is that you can love a person wholly without loving every part of them. “Relational Ambivalence” is the experience of contradictory thoughts and feelings—of love and hate, attraction and disgust, excitement and fear, contempt and envy—toward someone with whom we are in a relationship.”
In the case of walking from disappointment, the idea is double-edged both for the disappointer and the disappointed. For the “disappointer”, the decision to understand that disappointing each other is human and to be honest, quite important, because we have to sometimes disappoint others and even ourselves to redefine our expectations and reshape our dreams.
To the disappointed, the frame is also simple, switch up the expectations, leave room for people or events to show up differently, with people, for them to show up again in realignment with the expectations if you have the power to extend that grace and they are willing to try again.
This requires practice and it is not going to be an easy walk but at the core of this process is acceptance, recognition, and allowance for growth.
You know as well as I do that life doesn´t offer lots of second chances. So maybe we can be more generous with people we care about…
Looking forward to your comments and opinion on this!
Xoxo,
Dcconoissuer
Connoisseur of Memories 