Feeling Disappointment

Rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing.
– Charlotte Joko Beck

Sometimes we don’t let our emotions rest, my friend said the other day. We don’t let them rest on us. Even though I know better, she said, I think there’s still some part of me that believes an emotion isn’t worth feeling if it isn’t productive. Take sadness. Or take disappointment—that is an emotion we talk about even less than sadness. So I thought to myself: what does disappointment feel like?

Disappointment feels like loss. But like the loss of something known only to you: some dream, some convergence of expectation and hope, something that exists only in your own imagination and mind. And so it’s hard to express, harder still to understand, even to yourself, much less to someone else. Disappointment always feels insular. A bit lonely.

And because it’s something that never existed which you’re sad about, it’s easy to stuff it down, to pretend you’re a better person than that, you’re not so maudlin or selfish or naive as to dwell on something you wanted or thought would happen. You’ve gotten over the shock or surprise. But maybe you never really move on. Maybe the loss of this thing is the ghost you carry with you wherever you go, a specter that materializes whenever some unexpected thing reminds you of its existence.

Sometimes disappointment is a nuisance: a prickle in the skin, a bump in the road, acknowledged in passing. But sometimes it cuts deeper. It’s not just a bump on the road: it’s finding yourself on a completely different road, one you never thought you’d be on. And you’re doing your best, you’re going along, but disappointment is the creeping, inexorable certainty that this is not how it’s supposed to be. And maybe there is some deep and otherwise un-experience-able truth in that, some truth about the nature or degree of your desires or the world’s brokenness, but in the end, you’re still on this different road.

I have always been quick to mine my disappointment for lessons. But sometimes, it must simply be felt, this loss of something you never had, something you never even named to yourself, but which your disappointment is now making clear. Your disappointment is telling you it was there, and it’s okay to admit it was there, and be sad it is gone.