I think—I mean, for me—disappointment is the hardest emotion to handle. When someone doesn’t live up to their potential, or when someone ends up not being who you thought they were, dealing with that disappointment is a huge loss that you have to cope with.

I don’t think they intend to do it, any more than you or I would. But people disappoint you a whole hell of a lot.

Sometimes, we just change, we become a shell of the person the people who loved us thought they knew, all the good and kindness and promise they saw in us before is gone, replaced by gaslighting, lying, and dragging others down with them. It seeps into them and fills up those empty spaces where the good used to be, like epoxy poured through cracked wood. When you see them, years later, or talk to them, or even hear stories about them through the grapevine, it’s hard for you to believe that this part of them that won out. The part of them that you always told yourself was just a phase, and something they were just putting on to deal with the stress of their life right then. That’s the part they decided to let fill them.

 

Maybe this person I thought I knew never existed. Maybe I saw only the clay and not the mold. Maybe I refuse to see the flaws and instead chose to believe the best in people in a time when we were still forming and choosing who we were going to be. They have taken the way out that works for now, instead of the way out that could have helped them better themselves as a person. The person I knew is dead, or maybe just never was.

 

So what do you do when this disappointment comes flooding in in the form of phone calls or text messages or emails or personal encounters? I wish I knew. All I know is the person  I knew before is gone, and all I have left of them are photos, and memories of things they say never happened.

 

Words can hurt, words can be powerful, words can mean nothing. And right now, words are all I have left.