Dear Disappointment,

You’re not my favorite.  You are a slow drain on my motivation.  You make my brain fuzzy and indecisive.  You send me veering off track ever so slightly. You bring fear to the party, uninvited. I feel more adept at interacting with some of your crotchety and domineering relatives, like discouragement.  And over the years I have learned to set clear boundaries with despair.  I see nothing redeeming about spending quality time with you.

There’s no hope for you.

I purposely keep my expectations low so I can minimize how often we hang out.  I’m awesome at anticipating what is needed and adapting to people and circumstances.  I can shake your little solo missions fairly quickly.  But you… you just hover in the middle of my weekdays.  You look for ways to accumulate and gang up. You are the frown faces in calendar next to all the appointments you dissed—my cancelled meeting, my rejection notification on an application, my feverish and coughing kids, my mediocre night’s sleep.

Recently, I invited daring into my 2020 mindset. And I’m realizing that you come in the fine print.  You accompany daring wherever she goes.  You are the damper on more daring attempts.  You are the reason my risk-taking is so intentional and well-thought out.  And yet, I turn around and there you are, still. I see you. You keep one foot in the door so frustration can just slip right in.

Go away!

At least I can learn from failure.  That’s how we grow.  I understand how healthy fear makes me more courageous.  Grief, sadness, shame, guilt, rejection, loneliness…. I’ve had intimate relationships with all of these negative emotions and am better for them.  But you?  All you do is take, take, take.

What do you have to give?

Chronic disappointment becomes discouragement—the wearing down over time.  Chronic discouragement untreated becomes despair—the total loss of hope.  But I’m the queen of chronic hope.  That was my 2019 mindset.  You can’t touch my hope.

King Solomon the Wise of the ancient world said that,  “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

Or can you?  Are you the one who makes a heart sick?  Are you the one who stunts tree-of-life growth?  Are you the slow deferring of hope that flies under the radar?  Are you the one who causes my decision fatigue, for every dis-appointed thing I have to reconfigure?

What is the point of you?