How To Be Disappointed

<p style=”clear: both”>1) Be disappointed.

2) Let go of the story of how understanding and generous and forgiving you are, because the only thing worse than being disappointed in someone else is simultaneously discovering you are not the person you thought you were and not being able to reconcile yourself. Cognitive dissonance and unnamed, unnameable feelings only amplify the disappointment.

3) If you were my kid and you were disappointed, I’d totally tell you to feel what you’re feeling, but I might put boundaries on the behavior. It’s fine to be sad, but not so fine to throw yourself on the ground in the middle of the coffee shop and kick and scream because they are out of your favorite kind of scone. The floor is dirty and people give me funny looks.

4) Notice the script in your head that tells you of course you’re disappointed, your expectations were completely out of touch with reality. It never shuts up there, though, it points out that you are spoiled, self-absorbed, self-centered and used to having things go your way so that you are unable to deal when they can’t so of course you’re disappointed. It will go on abusing you because sometimes it easier to have the problems come from inside of you instead of outside you because then if you could just become a perfect person, you’d have control of your experience again. Laugh at the mean little voice and tell it, yes it’s scary not having any control isn’t it? But disappointment, like rain falls on the nice and the nasty alike.

5) Dispel the Disney heroine in your head who, chipper, is always looking on the bright side, making lemonade, finding silver linings, and making everyone love her with her sweet good-naturedness. Real people also don’t walk around with birds singing circling their heads, and honestly you would be swatting the birds within minutes as their incessant song gave you a headache. On a similar note, if hagiography makes you bitter rather than inspired — well, of course she bore up, she was a SAINT! then set the hagiography aside for now.

6) You don’t have to explain the disappointment away. Disappointment happens, and it doesn’t, in fact, mean that you’re a bad person, God has it in for you, or that you’re stupid for not having learned that life is just one disappointment after another.

7) Be careful what you “learn” from the disappointment. Pets die, some friends are regularly ten minutes later than they promised to be, soufflés fall. There’s all sorts of disconfirming evidence for every theory of how the universe is, so disappointment is not the time to decide that it is always going to be so painful.

8 ) Notice the brittle shell with which you try to protect yourself against future disappointment. Notice when one morning you feel hopeful again and that means that the brittleness has melted away. It happens. I promise.