Hello Elsa –
I have this recurring pattern in my life: I expect great things from people I encounter & connect with, and then end up disappointed or let down somehow over & over again.
But it seems to work both ways – as in as many times I feel let down by someone, I in turn seem to have let them down as well. Yet it’s nothing as concrete as in having huge dramatic scenes. Rather it’s a gradual a descent into disillusion.
The thing is, I really want to figure out how to turn this pattern around or work with it to make my relationships more mutually beneficial & less mutually disappointing. Any ideas?
Disillusioned
Dear Disillusioned,
Yes, I have ideas. You are very idealistic. You obviously need to lower your standards… which actually means raise them and I will explain.
People are very, very flawed. Every single one of them. So if you are looking for perfection, you are bound to be disappointed, but check this:
My lifelong friend Scott is a classical pianist. I was 15 when I met him and being from the desert, I had no sophistication of any kind. Yeah, I know. Nothing much has changed. But anyway, I remember him telling me about this piece of recorded music he liked to listen to. He said there were mistakes all through it but he thought it the best recording of this piece, ever.
He went on to mention that other people had made recordings of this certain piece that were flawless. No mistakes at all.
“What? Why don’t you listen to one of them?” I asked. ‘Why do you want to hear the thing messed up?” I asked.
And he explained the flawed recording was full of passion and far more powerful than the mistake-free recordings. He said it had tremendous heart that the other recordings lacked. It moved him. So are you getting this?
The messed up people who fail to meet your ideal standard are the beautiful ones. The ones with the nuance, the quirks, and the various facets and shortcomings are the real ones. Loving them as they are is what love is. And if you can change your perspective and start looking at people through this kind of lens, your life is going to improve immeasurably.
Good luck.
Dearest Elsa:
This post moved me so much… I cried a bit. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing your wisdom. You must be a very old soul.
Much love from the heart,
Michael
this was advice I need to follow myself 🙂
When I finished reading this I just felt this complete affirmation, haha, maybe it’s because I have Venus, Sagittarius in the 7th house too. Disillusionment. I completely understand that feeling and I’m still working through it though. Thanks Elsa, for writing this.
oops! I missed the fact Disillusioned’s Jupiter is in the 7th house not Venus!
I also wanted to thank Disillusioned too for writing much of the emotions that I couldn’t.
Thank you, Elsa. Your reply was such a poetic metaphor. It illustrates well the ‘patterns’ that have been occurring & re-occurring for most of my adult life. Yet, it seems that only in the last few years have I become truly mindful of these repetive situations, & when gathered together, were revealing of something more…Yes, I am HIGHLY idealistic and have far too often attributed these ideals to those around me, though not necessarily in the sense of expecting them to meet some kind of exacting, stringent standard (who me? the girl who can’t stop herself from grabbing the cat for a squeeze even when wearing all black or who must stop and smell the roses along the road even when in the middle of a bike race – naah, not me). No, its rather that I figure that most are coming from the same generous, good-natured place as me…but, dang it all, that just isn’t the case, is it? It’s taken me a long, long time to see what was making up all the ‘disillusioning’, and only recently I have begun to glean a some sense ofillumination out of it, this that can only come from tumbling so far from grace. Thus, can it be, for me at least, that I need to mix in the flawed with the ideal, and weave it all together to find something at the end that is GREATER than the sum total of its imperfect parts? You know like the homes that get built by those orgs with nothing but donated goods and volunteer ‘green’ help – the bits and pieces that go into the building up may not be the most finely honed and perfected elements but with a few dashes of an ideal and a whole lot of attempts at getting it right. And the end result? Well that brings a smile to each proud homeowner (this I know because I have seen it – a Habitat for Humanity 3 timer:-)Like the flawed recording in Elsa’s reply, its the better because of the passion in the doing. So I’ll keep looking for the illumination in the disillusion and apply what comes from that.
Thank you again Elsa for taking the time to reply and to the commentators – its has shed some more light.