I Was Disappointed, But It Also Took Me From The Wrong Place

There are times like this, those in which one goes from disappointment to disappointment, from hollow to hollow to finally open our eyes and discover that he lived on a strange island surrounded by false affections, people with double bottoms and wrong feelings. It is then that we pick up the broken pieces of our hearts to move forward without looking back, with graceful dignity and firm determination.

Sports psychology experts say that any athlete must learn early to deal with disappointment. In any competitive sport there will always be a winner and a loser. You will always experience moments of greater or lesser performance, as well as injuries and events unrelated to your own preparation or performance that can veto the ability to participate in a competition, in a test or in a match.

The same thing happens in the game of life. However, most of us are educated very early on the idea that if you make an effort, success is guaranteed and that if you take good care of the people you love, they will respond in the same way. Almost no one wanted to reveal to us that in the real-life ring two and two are not always four, that gray days abound more than blue ones, and that people are fallible, contradictory, and exquisitely imperfect.

Digesting everyday disappointments is not an easy task. However, and as a curiosity, it can be said that disappointment is the third most experienced emotion by human beings after love and repentance, and therefore we must learn to recognize it, assume it and face it. Here’s how.

Is disappointment an obligatory part of life? No, not always

There is no shortage of paternalistic air who does not comment that “experiencing great disappointment in life is something necessary. Because feeling disappointed will allow us to obtain the necessary motivation to grow ”. Well, these types of phrases look good on our social media walls, however, it is necessary to clarify and analyze them in detail.

In the first place, no one is forced to experience a devastating disappointment to “know what life is”. Rather, we are facing a dimension that we must learn to manage as soon as possible so that more than necessary does not happen. At the same time, . This is how one truly learns to deal with them and to channel them to obtain an adequate learning from them.

At the same time, it is important to reiterate the need to know how to deal with daily disappointment to avoid that sooner or later one of greater dimensions occurs, there where we get stuck in the corner of the dilemma, in the hole of pain and in the forest of despair. We say this for a very specific reason: the little unspoken disappointment becomes the silent killer of every relationship.

Let’s think about it for a moment: there are those who choose to silence that little snub from the couple that almost without knowing how, in the end it becomes a daily practice.  We also say that nothing happens if our best friend forgot that today, they gave us the results of some important medical tests. At the same time, we also decided to keep silent when our family ironic aloud about this “absurd” project in which we are so excited.

We avoid expressing aloud many of the disappointments felt for fear of offending others, for fear of breaking that bond that binds us to them … However, we forget that the main offended are us and that the one who keeps a disappointment after another eventually drowns. In the end he wakes up one day aware that everything that surrounds him is a deception. Let’s react before, let’s learn to react in time.

Untangle the knot of disappointments

One of the first things to avoid is practicing what is known as “hindsight bias. ” We speak of course, of that tendency to believe, after knowing the results, that we could have anticipated everything. There are things that cannot be foreseen, we do not have a crystal ball with which we can see how certain people are going to react. So the best thing is to accept what happened and avoid taking responsibility or projecting all responsibility on ourselves.

The second important aspect has to do with what we have commented before. We must be able to react to small disappointments before they become true steamrollers, the kind that leave our self-esteem at the height of the shoe. Remember to always talk about what bothers you “when it bothers you and not when it is late.”

The third and last point that we should apply in our day to day is the ability to have perspective. We must understand that we are all fallible, including ourselves. We all have the power to excite and disappoint, therefore, we are all subject to this unstoppable Ferris wheel where sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, where the right places soon no longer give more of themselves and it is necessary to recycle, change the map of road, of people and even of objectives.

Sometimes disappointments are little more than a strange mechanism in which life tells us that it has something much better in store for us …

Main image courtesy of Claudia Tremblay