…disappointed

I got turned down for an emergency Covid19 survival grant for our holiday let business today. I didn’t realise how much hope I had invested in it until the slightly curt email arrived informing me that, due to the volume of demand for help, the panel had said no.

What we do now, I’m really not sure. I need to sit with the disappointment for a while; allow it to sink in. It’s not the first time I’ve been disappointed and I know it won’t be the last, but of course, the stakes are so much higher now. I’m back to eating Lotus biscuit spread off a spoon and blubbing. My only consoling thought is that this feeling won’t, indeed, can’t last.

Grief has taught me many things, some I wish I’d never come to know, but one of the positives is that we humans can’t stay in the same state forever. Even in my darkest periods, I would find myself laughing at a silly joke or making toast because I was suddenly ravenous. It shamed me at the time, this pandering to human needs amid the grieving, but that’s just life breaking back through, demanding to be lived.

My disappointment won’t last forever. If we lose the business it may be replaced for a while by anger, but I doubt it. If other people are being helped ahead of us then I wish them well. And of course, the other great lesson of grief is that once you’ve walked through the flames of loss that first time, nothing much else can ever burn you quite as badly again.