Breathe Magazine Issue 076 Back Issue

Imagine the scenario: it’s your 10th birthday, and you’re having a party. You’re all dressed up, the cake is baked, games have been chosen, you’re waiting for your friends to arrive. Ten minutes before it’s due to start, your parent gets a call, and it’s followed by a flurry of texts. You’d invited 10, but only two turn up. You put on a brave face, but inside you’re devastated.
Disappointment, especially during childhood, weighs heavy on the heart. When you’ve wondered, hoped and dreamed of something, the realisation that it won’t be happening can knock you flat. And the pain of such moments might make you want to avoid feeling like that, ever again. This is when self-protective walls can be raised – blocks to feeling too hopeful, too excited. Expectations, meanwhile, are lowered – if you stop hoping for things, you won’t have to feel disappointed when things don’t work out, right?
And there’s good reason for that line of thinking. Not everyone wants to ride the emotional rollercoaster of yearning and sorrow. Flattening those feelings, steadying and suppressing them, seems to make sense. The problem is, by closing the door on vulnerability, you close the door on a lot more, too. Risks that you might have taken are avoided, opportunities you may have come across are missed. Triumphs and successes aren’t truly celebrated. The more you try to play it safe, stay in control, protect yourself, the more you block out – and that includes the good stuff.
But what if you embrace hope, and then it goes wrong? The worst happens, and you’re left to pick up the pieces? You bear the brunt of your disappointment, and it hurts. And then… you bounce back. You recover. You move on. The next time you feel hope, you get knocked down again, but this time you remember how you healed the last time, and moving on isn’t quite so hard.