The Reality of Optimism

Optimism should be a clinical disorder. 

Oh you optimists, with your glass half full and your eager smile, pissing everybody off with your unadulterated enthusiasm. Well dear society, just because we’re not crying into our box of cream doughnuts about how we’re never going to lose weight, or moaning on and expecting the worst out of every pathetic situation, it doesn’t mean we’re physically unable experience disappointment. You may stop belittling us now. 

As an optimist, second only to blind naivety, disappointment is just about all you feel. 

If anything, we’re in a worse place in society than the pessimists. At least they’re open to sympathy, and don’t have to cover up their “downs” as desperately as us, like we’re residents of Wisteria Lane and a body has been discovered in the freezer. In life, we’ve set the bar so high, that instead of relief or joy, we’re doomed to an eternity of let-downs. With each and every disappointment, comes the birth of new hope, condemned to the same fate as the last. 

Usually, nothing can ever break our stride. It literally takes our optimism to be clawed onto the pavement and kicked in the teeth before we bother to sit down and think. Our perfectly plastered walls come tumbling in, that pretty, flowery wallpaper disguising all the cracks and holes rips to shreds, and we sit there, helpless, until the dust vaporises into glitter and we can click our fingers to redecorate. 

… I’m waiting for the glitter. The wallpaper is ready. 

Wherever I go, and whoever I meet, I’m constantly finding myself on the wrong end of the sympathy stick because of my outside optimism. It’s as though I can’t possibly have any worries because okay, eating those cream doughnuts won’t exactly make me balloon ten stone, or just because most of the time I shut my eyes and believe there’s light, when others only choose to see darkness. It doesn’t mean I’m incapable of faults, or that there aren’t any there at all. 

Sometimes people put up a wallpaper of optimism, because the truth is too ugly to explain. Pessimists, take note, please, because that’s the reality.