on disappointment

Disappointment can manifest in many different ways, and on many different levels. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and have attempted to differentiate among the types of disappointment. I’ve classified them according to disappointer (the person who disappoints), as listed below:

(1) When extraneous circumstances disappoint. Extraneous circumstances come into play when you buy a box of cereal lacking a prize at the bottom or when the shirt you wanted to buy is sold out; this is the most harmless kind. You experience a twinge of disappointment, but life continues and you move on; there was nothing you could have done to prevent it and nothing you can do about it now. Extraneous circumstances also present themselves when you lose a $20 bill from the back pocket of your jeans, or when your efforts to catch a plane at the airport are proven futile. This type of disappointment is indeed governed by extraneous circumstances and you are helpless to fight it once it starts, but you will always wonder in the back of your mind if there was something you could have done to prevent it. Maybe you could have put the money in your wallet instead of your pocket; maybe you could have woken up a little earlier to avoid the traffic that kept you from catching your plane. You’ll never know, and this kind of disappointment caused by extraneous circumstances is tainted by the possibility that bad fortune struck in small part because of you.

(2) When a stranger or acquaintance disappoints. This is another kind of disappointment that, while inconvenient, has little bearing on your life. It can lead to a general feeling of discontentment, frustration, or mild disgust, but you realize that this stranger or acquaintance owed you little more than common human decency. You can curse humanity when the grumpy grandma grins evilly as the elevator doors shut despite your outstretched hand and feverish plea; or you can shake your head in disappointment at the coworker who turns in a terrible report and then proceeds to play Spider Solitaire on his computer. But regardless of those initial feelings of disappointment, at the end of the day, you can return home relatively emotionally unscathed.

(3) When a loved one disappoints. This kind of disappointment exists on many different levels and can birth the most raw and acute of human emotions. There’s the disappointment of failed expectations, when you expected a certain outcome to occur or a person to act a certain way, and those things and people fail to meet your expectations. There is also the angry kind of disappointment, when you mask your disgust or sadness with anger because the only way you can express your disappointment is through your anger. And then there’s the slow, quiet, yet deep-rooted disappointment. It’s the kind that festers over time, with every unanswered phone call, broken engagement, or seemingly harmless lie. Each individual act creates an innocuous droplet of disappointment; however, the droplets eventually come together, creating a large mass of disappointment, vulnerable to a single prick that could rupture it all. Whether it’s the broken promise of washing the dishes or the deep failure of living up to your expectations, it’s difficult to swallow that disappointment and look at the person in the same way again.

(4) When you disappoint. This is arguably the worst kind of disappointment, and the most difficult to overcome. It could be the feeling you get when you realize you’re not the person you thought you were, or the person you wanted to be. Or it could be the feeling you get when someone else is disappointed in you, not for gratuitous reasons but because you failed to meet their expectations of you. Either way, you have to admit full culpability and weather the consequences. And bearing that kind of disappointment is a heavy burden on your heart. It’s much easier to drop a disappointing person from your life than it is to deal with the feelings of guilt, regret, and painful retrospect.

I realized early on that the easiest way to avoid disappointment is to simply lower your expectations. However, realization is not actualization and I refuse to become a pessimist. I like getting excited about events and people, even if they ultimately end up disappointing me. There is a certain kind of joy to anticipation that I will never abandon or relinquish.