let-down

The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I__ going to be disappointed.

What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.

And anyway, once you allowed yourself to picture such a scenario, it couldn't happen. That was just the way life went.

He had a bad feeling that there was literally no one he could think of who wasn't in some very significant way a let-down.

He was always worrying about me _ even when we were kids. If I scraped my knee or fell off my bike, he was the first one to help me up and make sure Mom got a Band-Aid._ __ remember._ I smile. __e was the quintessential big brother._ __e was. But that__ just it _ he__ not here to protect me anymore, Anna. And you don__ have to be, either. I know I let stuff get crazy. I didn__ mean to be like that _ it just kind of happened. You couldn__ have changed that. I _ it was something I had to go through myself._ My throat tightens. __ felt like I let him down,_ I say. __ll that stuff with smoking and Johan and Jake _ I didn__ take care of you. I couldn__ even keep that one simple promise._ __nna, my brother died. There__ no way you could protect me from that. It__ up to me, now. I let him down. I let me down.

Don't pretend to comfort me, my friend. I might also pretend to not let you down.

She never wants to get to the point where she looks forward to hearing from someone. Once you look forward to something, you__e inevitably let down and nothing can stay the same so she'd rather expect nothing at all and just be surprised that she was thought of at all.

Even the ones who love you most will let you down. They are the ones who will disappoint you more because your expectations of them are higher. When you feel like they have let you down, you need to realize that it is not them who have let you down, but it is only your expectations that were not met.

Making the hard to decision to throw away a once favorite bra is like deleting an ex-friend that repeatedly let you down.

In my experience, the biggest reason people struggle to get where they want to be is guilt. Guilt that they have let someone down, and also guilt that they are about to leave someone they love ...behind.