Edel Coffey: You don't get inspiration from being in your comfort zone

Edel Coffey on disappointment. Picture: Ray Ryan

Disappointment is such a subtle word for such a strong, complicated emotion, isn’t it? 

I had a cool blast of disappointment a few weeks ago and it was a reminder of how difficult a feeling it can be. 

For the most part, my disappointments comprise of little things, like discovering that there is no milk in the fridge or that the croissant I’ve been thinking about eating all morning has already been scoffed (an occupational hazard of living with children). 

My disappointments don’t usually get too far under my skin. I live a very settled life. I’m married with children, I have a permanent place to live, I have a job and a schedule that I do not deviate from. 

So, big disappointments are few and far between. Thankfully. 

But my own recent disappointment, along with a friend’s ongoing struggle to buy a house, got me thinking about the nature of disappointment itself.

Whether you are disappointed in love, in work or in personal circumstances, there’s not really a lot you can do to protect yourself from disappointment. 

And it’s often related to things we have little or no control over — like trying to buy a house and competing with wealthy cash buyers. We have no way of preventing someone with a pile of cash from coming along and sweeping that dream home out from under our hopeful little noses.

Hope too plays such a big part in disappointment. When things are out of our control, we can’t turn to our usual toolkits and take steps to change or influence anything. All we can do is get our hopes up, and then feel the disappointment when those hopes are not met.

Disappointment can be complex and uncomfortable because we know that disappointments are small stuff – anything more serious has a different name, like grief, or failure, or trauma. 

So the fact that disappointments hurt us so much can feel humiliating. 

It can be embarrassing to acknowledge that you’re upset by a disappointment. It can feel immature, unevolved even, to be ruffled by small let-downs. A disappointment is after all not a tragedy, it’s not fatal. 

Disappointments are always recoverable from. Surmountable. And perhaps that’s why we feel embarrassed, we know it’s silly, we know it’s not the end of the world, we know life goes on, yet still it hurts. 

There’s something in that that makes us want to hide our pain from others, we feel weak or foolish for having hoped in the first place.

But even though it’s embarrassing, it can help to talk. And talking will either elicit some sympathy or a new perspective that you might not have considered before. It might also elicit a few platitudes. 

People will say mollifying things like – “what’s for you won’t pass you by”. I really detest that one. 

Or “it’s all for the best”. That’s a real humdinger too. 

Or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I know these phrases are well-intended but perhaps it’s better to just acknowledge that something disappointing has happened than try to explain it away as a karmic blessing designed to clear the way for much better things to come.

But here’s the thing I’ve noticed about disappointments. After a little time has passed, often they do indeed lead to much better things. 

Much like with a romantic break-up, after a little while, disappointments can start to feel like a gift. 

You know those break-ups, the ones where after a day or two you think you’ll die if you don’t reunite with your ex? But then, slowly but surely, you start to feel better, more like yourself than ever, so that when finally, after a period of six weeks or so, when your ex contacts you to say “actually, sorry, I’ve made a terrible mistake, can we get back together?” the very thought of it curdles your soul and you wonder why you were so cut up in the first place. 

I think that’s how disappointments work too. The human spirit is adaptive, optimistic in nature and will find a way to diversify and move on from disappointments.

One platitude I do like is “this too must pass” because all things do eventually pass, including disappointments. 

And, after you’ve gotten over the shock of the suckerpunch and the smoke of battle has cleared, you can see things a little more clearly, and a whole new vista rolls into view, perhaps one that you hadn’t even thought of before, but one that you realise now you like much better, one that feels like a window opening and fresh air spilling in on the stale old world you had been living in.

It’s worth remembering that change, progress, growth don’t tend to come from everything going our way. 

We don’t tend to get insights or inspiration from the comfort of our safety zones. Disappointments, however difficult, always lead to change, pivots, new perspectives. 

They shake things up, prompt action and nearly always for the better. So I’m going to keep on hoping in times of disappointment, because I know, in the words of Katy Perry, “after a hurricane comes a rainbow”.