On Disappointment

The feeling does not present itself immediately. No, it works in a different manner; it manifests itself gradually, from a few morsels of disgruntlement into a full-fledged main dish of a sensation. It’s usually accompanied by a healthy dose of denial too, one which makes it very difficult to actually realize what it is that you’re feeling. You feel sad, about something someone does, and you find that you were expecting more of them. Expecting them to do something that, for all intents and purposes, you thought they were capable of doing. So you feel sad for a while, and then you move on. Then it happens again, and the sadness re-emerges, perhaps this time with a nice little side-dish of anger. But then it fades away. The cycle repeats, again and again, until at some arbitrary point, you realize that you’re not feeling any of those things, but in fact you’re feeling something deeper and much more unfortunate. You’re disappointed in them, and — even worse — in yourself for having been led down that merry path of sadness and unfulfillment. That really is the worst thing about it, right? That you felt the desire to lie to yourself, and you knew you were, but you just kept on doing it, because the alternative felt so much worse. We resist disappointment with such vehemence because we don’t want to let go of the hope that there could be more. We resist it because otherwise we have to accept that people are fallible, that they won’t live up to our expectations, that they won’t always keep their promises. We resist it because it introduces an element of uncertainty into one’s mind; you always have to temper your future expectations with the possibility of them not being met, for fear of being disappointed yet again.