Carrying Hope with Care: On Expectations, Disappointment, and the Courage to Care Anyway

Setting Expectations

They say that the best way to avoid disappointment is to keep your expectations as neutral as possible. Don't expect the best, and equally, don't expect the worst. I spent much of my life trying to toe that line. Managing my expectations felt like the best way to preemptively regulate my emotions.

Regulate emotions that would betray the fact that, no matter what I told myself, I was still nurturing a hope that my unspoken and unacknowledged expectations might somehow be met.

Some advice is unrealistic.

To assume that we can move through life expecting neither the best nor the worst of the people we encounter is perhaps the highest form of apathy sold as a virtue.

It is human to get our hopes up, so why set ourselves up for failure by trying to convince ourselves that we expect nothing at all?

We should not begrudge ourselves for feeling hopeful.

Confronting Disappointment

Disappointment happens to us all.

Those of us who have a lot of experience with it have learned how to minimize the attention we give it. We have learned to brush it off and move on. We become trained to barely acknowledge the way it quietly shapes how we show up in conversation, in connection, and in life.

We steel ourselves for and after disappointment.

Impassive on the surface while the inner critic reigns supreme, reminding us that we have done this song and dance before. We suppress the turmoil within ourselves with quiet and often futile promises that we will not succumb to misplaced hopes and expectations again. We pacify our emotions although our thinking brain knows this is not the last time that we will feel this way. We are human after all. The audacity of hope carries its light within us all.

Who ever told us we had to resist the feelings of disappointment?

Rather than internalize the quiet shame disappointment tries to communicate, why not hold space for the emotion? Sit with it without giving it the power it so often claims, acknowledging it for what it is, and then choosing to let it go.

No promises that we will safeguard ourselves better in the future.

No more commitments that we will build the walls higher, and reinforce the bolts to ensure that we minimize the pain and sting... That we can withstand the salt in the wound that is the taste of our own disappointment.

While disappointment can feel like sinking, we can choose to rise above and let it all go.

Surviving Hurt

We have all survived the disappointments of our past.

We have chosen, in more cases than none, to live better and choose wiser as a byproduct of the hurt. What we could not avoid has inadvertently woven itself into the fabric of our becoming, and we have always had the choice to become better because of the experience.

We do not need to be the walking wounded.

Only seen as the bearer of disappointments past.

We are proof that we can, we have, and we will continue to survive the hurt.

We can be the proof that others need that maybe (just maybe), we can do the braver thing and carry that perpetual hope with care. Becoming wiser in choosing the who and how, we still choose to lay ourselves bare to disappointment.

Rather than withhold, we give ourselves permission to care.

Because we do care... disappointment is proof of that.

And truly, the one thing no one seems to realize is that there is nothing wrong with caring. There is strength that can always be borne from a heart that needs mending.

We can choose to allow disappointment to breed within us the compassion and the empathy needed, to not carelessly inflict disappointment on others.

Sometimes we need the lived experience to know the difference... and with that knowledge we have the ability to be the difference too.

Perhaps the goal was never to expect less. Perhaps the goal was to trust ourselves to survive disappointment when it arrives.

We survive the darkness when we choose to be the light.

#disappointment #compassion #care #empathy