“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.” ―
I have a bad habit of getting my hopes up about everything, and then, my life is so much harder when it all falls apart. I see all the bad things in my life, and I try so hard to see the good. Most of the time the things I see as good are things that haven’t fully developed, like new opportunities and prospects. This is probably the reason it’s so hard for me to be optimistic.
It is easy to imagine a bright wonderful future when you’re depressed and imagine having certain things in your life. However, when you have the opportunity to have these things or even do get them, they’re not really what you imagined. They don’t fix you or make you happy. They’re probably not even what you imagined because nothing is really like the fairy-tales you imagine. There are real problems and real issues.
That doesn’t stop you though. You keep thinking about the future and how it will play out, and this is a mistake. It blinds you from what is right in front of your face. There is always that negative little voice in your head that tells you the truth and warns you, but you brush it aside time after time because if you address these concerns you are called negative and paranoid and maybe even crazy.
If the thing you are getting your hopes about is a person or a relationship, a quote from a TV show comes to mind. In the show Bojack Horseman, Bojack and his girlfriend are breaking up, and to explain why things changed, he says, “Same thing that always happens. You didn’t know me and then you fell in love with me. And now you know me.” I could really relate to this.
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” ―
We see people the way we want to see them. We see opportunities the way we want to see them. We gloss over what is actually in front of us with what we want it to be. We ignore the voice that we hear telling us the truth because we don’t want to hear it. We allow ourselves to be happy and hopeful on false securities. We’re happy about something we don’t have and never will because it probably doesn’t even exist outside of our imagination.
Then, whatever it is, gets taken away. We feel empty and sad and disappointed. We play a game of what if and try to figure out how we could have ended up with the opposite result. We obsess and cry over the things that never got the chance to happen like they were ever really ours or in our path. The worst part is how we blame ourselves. We get upset because we should have known not to be happy until it was really ours. We should have listened to that voice in our head that we ignored, but it was always right. We have to leave with the pain of losing something we dreamed up even though it was never real. We should know better than to get our hopes up.
-Love, Dee
Flamingle 