Something Will Turn Up or, Evading Bitterness

Notes on Disappointment

Mr Micawber and David Copperfield

Ten days ago, my heart was broken. It broke in such a sharp, irrevocable way that I knew that moment would go down in my personal history as a pivotal one. It was not the ending of a relationship but rather the death of a dream that I nurtured like a baby; one that I shared quite carefully and only with a handful of people. I allowed myself to grieve it, to bury it while kissing its temple goodbye.

I have written here about rejection before, but this was a completely different beast. My chest hurt while I cried like a child over the hopelessness of that one closed door. I have achieved much in my life and am now on the path of greasing the hinges of the doors to other possibilities, but ouch – that one really hurt.

I have been thinking a lot about how we are perceived in certain ways by others and just how rare real intimacy is. How many people would you say you trust enough to show your real self to? I don’t believe for a second in the made-up versions of ourselves, and that is not even limited to social media at all. It is called existing in the world, the fine-tuning to survive in the jungle of human expectations.

There are many identifiers people might use to refer to me – professor, academic, reader, fan, has published this, listens to that, works at, loves cats, vegetarian – and over the last couple of weeks, I have chewed over the fact that many of the shards of identity others attach to us and that we ourselves accept for the sake of convenience do not amount to much. If there even is such a thing as a stable identity, if life and the self are not made up again and again at every moment, isn’t it remarkable how scarce it is – or rather, how scantily available it is made to others? Even if you’re a celebrity or an oversharer – maybe even especially then – there’s a constant filtering and curation of what is suitable and what is not.

Listening to other people talk about me – say, on my birthday – and highlight the things they think define me the most, there will be some things I am quite proud of, but there will also be things I have done and keep doing just to get by. Everyone will have achievements that allow you to earn a livelihood or go through life in a certain way, but that do not come remotely close to touching your heart. And then there are the losses, the grief, the invisible disappointment that they will not see and you will be thankful for that. During the pandemic, people kept telling me they thought of me while watching The Queen’s Gambit, a show I detested. At that time, I was obsessed with Julie and the Phantoms. It made me think just how mismatched the vibes I must be putting off were. Shielding yourself is fine, but there is also a sadness in acknowledging the irrevocable distance that this will establish between you and most of your fellow humans, that fundamental misunderstanding of your entire value system.

And then there’s heartbreak. The thing with an earth-shattering disappointment is that it brings with it, for me at least, a great deal of fear. What I fear is not rejection itself, but rather the possibility of bitterness. I have known many people who are defined by the resentment that filters their perception of the world, and I suppose what scares me the most is the idea of developing a version of that myself. I am afraid of losing myself to others in that way, of having the things that make me myself become deformed by cynicism. In whatever circumstance I find myself, I always look to the bitterest person in the room and wonder whether there’s a chance I might end up that way. If there is, I know I must run for the hills. I have spent nearly thirty-two years working on being a person, fine-tuning all my long-term goals into a single objective: happiness. The world is burning, tyrants loom everywhere, we have no idea how long we have, so I figure that what I do need is a great deal of joy.

On the day that disappointment came about, I went to the Donmar to watch Backstroke, Anna Mackmin’s new play starring Tamsin Greig and Celian Imrie. It is about motherhood, loss, grief, and memory. The performance brought an already quite raw Marcela to tears. It made me miss my own mum, of course, somebody who always went through difficult times with a smile on her face; not a fake one, mind you, but one made out of a truly sunny outlook on life. My mum is a firm believer in the politics of joy, never adhering to any kind of austerity. I, always much more conservative in my belief in living in the moment, found solace and inspiration in that through my heartbreak. The sense that it is so much better to be hopeful, to be an optimist and to believe something great will happen just around the corner.

On that note, I have recently revisited David Copperfield and felt the wonder of realising just how brilliant Mr Micawber’s “something will turn up” is. Micawber is a fictional version of Dickens’s father, John. So, I had always read his little catchphrase under a negative light – as Dickens poking fun at John’s financial irresponsibility that got not only himself, but his whole family, into scrapes. But now I see it as a ray of sunshine. The Priest asks Fleabag: Why would you believe in something awful when you could believe in something wonderful? Why indeed. I bet something great will turn up.