Thoughts on Disappointment

When your way is blocked, suddenly, and you find yourself in a puddle of broken expectations. Photograph by Nora Kovats. Corridor flanking the courtyard at Hildesheim’s oldest cathedral.

So this year’s international trade fair in Munich, including all its special shows like Handwerk & Design and the SCHMUCK and TALENTE competitions, has been cancelled due to the corona virus threat. I’ve dreamed about showing my work at Handwerk & Design for years.

 This year, I had forged my own opportunity to exhibit there by gathering a group of fellow artists from Berlin, envisioning and then organizing a group show that would have been more than just individual artists next to each other: it would have been a curated exhibition integrating eight different unique visual languages. For me, this was an ambitious project, one that has kept me increasingly busy since November, with the past six weeks becoming an organizational marathon. It was so wonderful to see this group of artists come together and give their time freely, discuss the most divergent ideas and reach conclusions and compromises, build tiny scale cardboard models of our display, render the display in 3D, then build the entire thing from scratch, even sawing the wood into pieces ourselves. Then, five days ago, this vision crumpled into sawdust as I received the news that the entire fair had been cancelled.

 I wasn’t entire unprepared, of course not, with other trade fairs and large gatherings being cancelled all over Europe. But the disappointment was acute and real and painful, even though, honestly, the entire project might have been a failure even if the fair had not been cancelled.

 So I’ve been thinking about disappointment all week. What exactly is this disappointment thing? How can we define it? It’s painful, yes, it has a lot to do with expectations that could not be met, but it’s not anger, it’s not really shame or guilt either. It’s sort of a hollow feeling, a space that would have held something glorious and sparkling and hopeful, and that is now empty. It’s a little paralysing, a melancholy type of inertia. It’s a vacuum that can now be filled - often with a squadron of negative emotions chasing each other into the ditch: frustration, self-flagellation, a crumbling self-esteem, disillusionment, bitterness and resentment.

The best place to observe your disappointment will always be nature. Going for long, aimless walks to fill empty spaces inside with simple grains of gratitude, watching nature grow and die and flower and crumble. Somewhere in Brandenburg. Photograph by Nora Kovats.

 I keep asking myself how we ought to deal with disappointment? And what’s the point of it? Typically, I tend to react to disappointment with denial; I justify to myself that the disappointing event wasn’t really that important, I charge on with a new mission, never looking back, in a crazy storm of self-preservation. While that’s a great survival mechanism that has served me well in the past, I am not entirely convinced anymore that it is useful in the long run. I feel this process of extricating yourself from disappointment has a lesson to teach that I haven’t been ready to learn yet. It seems that I should sit with this disappointment for a few days, examine it, experience and articulate what it feels like before the void gets filled either with angry frustration or manufactured hope.

 While it can feel like a curse, disappointment is in essence a resilience-building tool. It is a really vital part of our lives. To clarify, by that I don’t mean a tool to cultivate the ability to ignore disappointment, to readjust with superhuman speed and bounce back like a jack-in-the-box. Rather, what I mean is the capability to hold this disappointment, to embrace it, taste it, and then gingerly starting to re-fill the void with those first slithers of gold and dream dust. And bit by bit, you rebuild your vision, you make it better and stronger this time, the walls are more solid, the glue holding everything together is tougher because there’s a foundation cemented by the possibility of failure, and there’s a type of wisdom underneath that is heavier but also more real than your lighter, younger self’s view of life.

 Disappointment is the supreme editor of our life plans. It’s a builder of strength and mutual empathy. Those cyclical ups and downs of hope and expectation, shattered by disappointment, and rebuilt again, are a kind of energy generator, an engine keeping us in motion, our feet on the ground and our head in the clouds.

Spaces to Fill. 2019. Watercolour & ink painting on Hahnemühle watercolour paper.