On Disappointment

Among all the emotions I carry, disappointment sits in its own category, the one I least want to experience. I don’t feel it often, and that is not an accident. I don’t place people in positions where they can disappoint me, I don’t expect much from anyone, and I don’t let just anyone close enough to matter, something I’ve written about before in my defensive nature . on top of that, I’ve built a bubble around myself, overly selective about my environment, deliberate about who gets near it. I wrote about this at the opening of not broken but suboptimal . but none of that makes me immune. you cannot fully program your life. mistakes will happen. people you never invited will find their way in, and sometimes you won’t notice until it’s already too late.

People get hurt every day, and not always by those who intended harm. not always by those they dislike. sometimes the damage comes from the ones who simply don’t account for what they leave behind. the ones who never apologize. the ones who move through the world without once looking back at the mess they’ve made. I’ve been fortunate enough that people have generally treated me with a certain level of respect, and I’ve returned it without hesitation. I’m a straightforward person, I don’t play games, and people tend to respond to that in kind. there’s a reason for this, it has always been there, you don’t mess with someone who holds boundaries out of genuine self respect, consciously or not, you read the signal and you adjust. and the more honest you are with yourself, the less you hide behind masks, and the more you show up as the version of you that doesn’t need to harm others to feel whole.

Today was a reminder that the world is still full of people who are mindless, irrational, irresponsible, and deeply unaware of what they leave in their wake. they still exist. they live among us. and the terrifying part is that they don’t announce themselves. they don’t have a cunning smile or an obvious edge to them. they look completely normal, like you and me. sometimes you’ll catch a signal early, something careless, something off. other times you’ll be blindsided entirely. but if you’re someone who respects yourself, eventually you will feel it, you will feel hurt, you will feel the specific sting of disappointment, because at some point you made the quiet decision that they were good, that they deserved your kindness.

And that is what tears me apart. from the moment I met certain people, I was kind to them, not because they were exceptional, but because that is how I treat people. I am someone who is learning to respect himself , and from the start I invest, through actions, through care, through showing up, through advice, through gifts, through being present, because they are human beings. I care about the wellbeing of every person I encounter, and if I cannot help I will at least not make things worse. but no. I have had to remember again that some people simply don’t deserve you. just in the plainest, most ordinary way, they consume you in the moment and forget you the next. it’s not even that they’re ungrateful at their core. what cuts me is that when they do you wrong, they don’t apologize. they don’t even see it.

What happened recently was deeply disappointing. I don’t like accumulating black dots between myself and another person, hate is something I genuinely cannot afford, so I confronted them. I told myself maybe they were shy, maybe they don’t know how to talk, or apologize, maybe they were having a rough day, maybe they were stressed, maybe I misread things entirely, maybe it was even my fault. I gave them every possible reason before I asked the simplest question I could think of: do you see what you’ve done as wrong. and they said I don’t know. those three words hit somewhere deeper than I expected. there was a flash of anger, and then, quieter and more persistent, two days of disappointment that settled into my chest. because once you have believed that someone is sane, that there is something thinking behind their eyes, there is brain in that skull that they have the capacity to recognize harm by using it, and then they look at you and say I don’t know, you are not just hurt by what they did. you are grieving the version of them you invented.

I regret every hour I gave them. not out of bitterness, but because I now see it clearly, they didn’t deserve it. there is a line you cross with me, and once you cross it there is no return. not out of coldness, but out of something that feels more like clarity. such people will appear in life, perhaps more than once. and my answer is simple now, to erase them from the map of my attention, to forget they exist, because I cannot look them in the eye, I cannot smile back, I cannot shake hands with someone whose hands I no longer recognize. I just remove them. and I hope, genuinely, that I don’t have to feel this again.