In defense of disappointment

The pit in my stomach is green. Slimy snot green, green as putrid algae gathering at the edge of stagnant water, the stench of something fermenting in darkness, and it sits there rude and wet while I stare at this page wondering how exactly one defends disappointment, because disappointment feels so yucky when you are inside it, so humiliating and nakedly human, and yet here I am again in this ongoing practice of leaning toward the things I would rather reject, the things I wish to outrun with silver linings or spiritual language or productivity or simple disappearance.

Let me back up. I need to reverse engineer how I got here, where much of my life I’ve lived with low expectations and therefore am delightfully surprised by even the wad of gum on my shoe. I learned early that modest expectations amplify gratitude and are an effective hedge against despair. This is why disappointment feels so violent and ugly when it’s mine to experience, it means somewhere today, yesterday, last year, I let myself to want something. There’s that needy word, “want.” The last time I remember feeling this level of collapse was during the long years trying to cure my dizziness. After one particularly expensive and elaborate Neurolinguistic Healing Program, I spent eight weeks marching past-present-future patterns across Mom’s basement floor repeating empty affirmations about stillness and ease while imagining my future healed self waiting ahead of me like a patient midwife at the threshold of my own rebirth. I feel silly when I think about it now, but at the time the want was with animal sincerity. I wanted my life back, I wanted my body back.

Last November my memoir launched and wow, readers found it, landing something like the opposite of disappointment right in that soft spot beneath my breastbone. It was fulfillment, gratification, yes. I experienced a similar response to Unfixed Media, all those strangers describing how they finally felt seen, less alone, even inspired. It was beyond satisfying, more beautiful than anything I had trained myself to un-expect. So un-disappointing! And because life seems devoted to paradox, delight unfurled its wings and revealed vulnerability nestled right inside its downy softness. The more I loved the work, the more power I unconsciously assigned outside the work, to people, to institutions, gatekeepers, outcomes, and all the shimmering clout humans build around creative output. And slowly—shame on me I’d repeat in my darkest moments—I bought it.

Over the years, I have applied for more grants than I can count. And every time I send an application into the digital void, I feel like I am giving a piece of myself, my worth, to gatekeepers. The big "they" decide whose stories get seen and whose stories get hidden away. I'll be honest, I have never made a single penny from Unfixed. Not from the films. Not from the podcasts. Not from the book. So a few weeks ago I threw up my hands after another grant refusal and another unmet fulfillment and said to Dave, “I’m worn out, I’m done,” but what I really meant to say was, “I’m so very disappointed.”

Dis-appoint, a mistaken appointment.

Oh! Snap! How often have I been appointing my power to the wrong thing? Giving authority outside the pulse of the work as if the stethoscope drives the heartbeat? Why am I giving someone else guardianship of my creative aliveness? Unfixed was alive long before anyone else touched her, before the exposure, before the publisher, she was alive when I lived her, she was alive when film subjects first shared their stories on camera, alive when I started writing my own memoir inside the eye of the storm, alive when she reached another nervous system and made a stranger feel less alone at 2am in Illinois or Portland or Dublin or wherever these little paper boats wash ashore. The work, moving along channels I couldn’t see, finding the people it was meant to find, having its own life outside of human agenda?

Still, disappointment exposes my yellowing bruises, some tired old insecurity that I am not quite enough, real enough, smart enough, savvy enough, to deserve solidity. Never enough. That I am allowed to make things so long as I do not ask too much of the world in return.

I feel how disappointment finds my oldest wounds, how quickly it draws blood: I am only pretending, I have slipped accidentally into rooms meant for real filmmakers, writers, artists, real adults who get how the world works. Ouch. I go green. I want to hide. I start shaming my openness, wondering if my vulnerability was wrong. If all this soft-hearted hopefulness is really just naïveté. And in my hiding, mental fists come out, fight back fight back. I imagine all the ways I might flatten people and systems into the bad guys. Sometimes I really want to. It would be easier, but then I remember all the moments of genuine goodness that were also true. God we are messy multitudes, loving and maiming simultaneously. The complexity of this has been the hardest part for me to metabolize because disappointment would be so much easier if people and organizations and systems were simply monstrous shitheads. Disappointment is my body reclaiming itself from all these illusions, sediment and stones becoming visible as water clears, my nervous system finally seeing what was beneath the beautiful story.

With every hope, I place something pink and fragile into uncertain hands. We give each other our unfinished hearts even though we know we have been hurt and we will be hurt again. We do it anyway because deep down we know that isolation and giving up deforms us far more than disappointment ever could. And while my knee-jerk reaction to the shame of disappointment is to hide, I’ve already been there done that, dizzied inside a narrative no longer true, I reached the end of my own self-sufficiency in that story and now find myself believing in those standing beside me, the integrity of family and friends, Dave sitting quietly with the part of me that feels foolish and tender and scraped raw by wanting too much from this world. I whisper the mantra every time I need it, which is a lot these days, “I will remain soft, I don’t want to only trusts what cannot wound me.”

It’s an unsettling yet clarifying groundlessness. Me oh my I’m getting good at thriving on fluid foundations. Eventually the collapse reveals another awareness, wetter and wider and less in charge. My blood moves through my veins with devotion, fungal threads pass nutrients beneath the forest floor. Despite my disappointment, existence keeps reaching, placing my bruises in a bigger context where hurt and beauty nestle up alongside one another like Otis and Nova curled together one minute and then a fur storm of hisses the next. Beneath the storyline, an arc much older, more fractal, more relational—maybe not an arc at all but spiraling—continues moving. My body remembers it belongs to rivers and seasons and kisses and stars. The fruit will fall, the beloved will change, the illusion will break. Disappointment returns my own little stories to the larger compost heap of Life, all this heaviness slowly warming into hot fertile dreaming.

I want to defend disappointment because it belongs here among the rest of this beautiful mess, among winter and decay and failed crops and tides pulling away from shore and apples collapsing into the earth after an entire season spent reaching toward sweetness and light, I defend it because disappointment shows me how much I have loved, how dearly I have hoped, every dis-appointment the possibility of a re-appointment—a sucky, sweet, opportunity to return trust to a more sacred source. Tomorrow morning I’ll sit at the edge of my bed, left sock on then right, a certainty to step into a day of its opposite, and imagine another human also sitting there, realizing the story they told themselves can no longer hold, and somewhere beneath that collapse, fresh water moves underground.