I need to talk to you about disappointment…
Life lessons as a signpost for the road ahead.
It’s a Friday of a baking hot August week in 2010. I’m on work experience, and I’m crying in the toilets of my dream employer.
During the second week, I interviewed for an entry-level job at the book publisher, and I’ve just found out I didn’t get it.
Eventually, I pull myself together, rinse my face in the little handbasin, dry my eyes with a rough blue paper towel, and go back to my temporary desk. I say nothing to anyone about it.
I feel ashamed.
That job would have meant fresh opportunity, a new start, and a brand-new career path. But I didn’t get it.
Disappointment burns from time to time in life and it doesn’t matter if it’s at work or in private life – it all feels just as raw.
There’s one weekend, a few years later, where I’ve been a guest at two baby showers in two days. One on the Saturday, and one on the Sunday, before I drive home again in the scorching sun.
When I arrive back home, I can’t help but go into the spare bedroom, where I feel certain that one day I will be placing my own baby in a cot in this carpeted room.
The swirl of hope stirred with disappointment is my lot, currently.
For now, the baby’s absence is making me feel as echoey inside as this furniture-less room.
I’ve laid out the markers of success for myself to reach like a life-stage bleep test and I’ve barely hit any of them. I remind myself how incredibly fortunate I am; for one, we have scraped enough to have a mortgage on this place.
Previously, we lived in a rented flat with mice, who eat the herbs off the kitchen side and scuttle behind the oven when I’m cooking. They nibble our underwear in the laundry basket.
Are you OK? You don’t seem yourself… people ask with concern.
Professional disappointment hurts too, in a strangely embarrassing way.
Can people tell? Do people know I have to climb over a bike wedged at the foot of the stairs of a house that probably shouldn’t be rented out as two flats just to get in the door? Does it show?
Now I am more experienced at work, I see that the publishing industry has a thick thread of failure knotted through its very texture. It isn’t much discussed, but it’s there.
Books at their heart are a gamble.
Stories need recommendation, connection and a dandelion-clock-puff of immense good luck to lift them onto the right breeze. Maybe not at publication. But at some point.
Coping with disappointment, I am learning, is a life lesson that is always painful. I remind myself of my philosophies.
Life is not The X Factor and this is not your only chance.
Other opportunities might present themselves as a direct result.
Keep your focus on your many blessings.
Fill your life with so many marvellous things that you don’t have the capacity for disappointment, because your existence is rich with love for yourself.
The last piece is told to me by a surprisingly philosophical masseuse during a hen weekend, who tells me she treats herself as the most precious thing in her entire world, because she is. You need to look after yourself, she says. Put a box on your desk filled with hand lotion and vitamins and water. When you’re on the phone, moisturise your hands and arms. Have so many hobbies and loves that your world is full. And have more massages, she adds with a grin.
It’s 2015.
We have scraped enough for a deposit on a house, but we are outbid time and time again.
I’m aching for a home, but the one we found, even with a fox den in the garden and its back door nailed shut after a burglary, is out of our price range.
(One of the many fox cubs from the garden)
It is tiny, but perfect for us. We look beyond the shortcomings to its potential. Everything is like a doll’s house inside – tiny steep staircase, two little bedrooms, and the smallest living room I’ve ever been inside.
We bid.
We’re outbid.
We bid on an even worse one on the same street.
It’s got Japanese knotweed in the garden and I can nearly touch all four walls in the kitchen at the same time. The house feels incredibly sad, but we can afford it. We’ll have to walk past the house we loved every time we go into the town centre.
We’re outbid, yet again. We can’t afford to go any higher.
I’m sick of it all.
We plan a holiday with my family to Northumberland. I need a break.
(Kite flying with my family in my beige shorts on Bamburgh Beach, Northumberland.)
Beforehand, I go shopping, feeling reckless. I buy myself a fizzy orange jumper and a pair of beige shorts. They are the clothes of a sunny, optimistic person.
They are the clothes of a woman who greets the future with excitement.
Why shouldn’t I spend some cash on myself?
A couple of months later, while we’re away, I’m reading on the sofa when my phone rings.
‘Do you still want that house? The other buyer has pulled out. If you can get an email over to me by tomorrow it’s yours.’
I look at my confident woman’s jumper. Let’s do it.
(My cheery jumper)
What I’m trying to say is, things get better. Disappointment never, in all honesty, gets much easier to take. But over time, there are other things to prop up happiness rather than pinning hopes on huge changes.
No feels like failure. A not this time feels like it’s a not ever. But we’re all out here dealing with these things while juggling work or home life or elderly family or children.
Sadness, illness, distraction, grief, sleep deprivation.
All layered over the day-to-day. I have probably spent too much time trying to compartmentalise and pretend it all didn’t exist.
Instead of refusing to wallow for a bit, next time I feel disappointment, I’m going to name it out loud.
I’d have loved that opportunity.
Next time.