Stay

How the Skill of Staying Is Built Through Disappointment and Acceptance

The Only Exception - Paramore

“We learn how to stay by practicing it in moments we’d rather escape.”

I hate rollercoasters. I have a fear of heights and I’m prone to motion sickness, so I avoid most amusement park rides. Yes, I’m no fun. But when your daughter loves rollercoasters, and she has no one else to take her, you sometimes swallow the discomfort and say yes.

A few years ago, Ali had a beach tournament in Wildwood, New Jersey. Between games, we wandered the boardwalk at Morey’s Pier, and she set her sights on the Great White—a rickety wooden coaster where the biggest fear isn’t the height, but whether the thing will stay on the tracks.

“Please go with me,” she begged.

I sighed. I didn’t want her to go alone. I also hadn’t taken Dramamine.

“Okay,” I said. “But only once.”

We climbed into the car. The attendant checked our lap belts. The gears began their slow, creaking ascent.

My breath shortened. My chest tightened. I closed my eyes to avoid seeing the ground fall away beneath us.

The first hill rises 110 feet. I opened my eyes briefly—we were still inching upward. Lightheaded now, I shut them again.

The car paused at the top.

Here we go.

In one sudden drop, we plunged. My stomach fell. My eyes watered. Heat rushed through my body. Inside a darkened tunnel, the world went black, and for a moment I lost my orientation entirely.

The ride stopped.

“That was awesome!” Ali shrieked. “Let’s go again!”

Disappointment is the precursor to acceptance. I’ve come to understand this through my own lived experience.

Feelings arise in the body before we ever have language for them—stomachs drop, eyes sting, chests tighten, fingers tingle. We don’t choose those sensations. What we do choose is whether we stay present with them, or abandon ourselves when they arrive. That choice determines whether disappointment moves through us—or calcifies.

I’ll never forget my first real heartbreak. It was a dream I carried for years, an outcome I held as a genuine possibility. When I first encountered it, it felt like stepping into a bubble cast in golden light. For the first time in a long while, I felt free. My chest expanded. My heart raced. Life made sense. The intensity of the feelings overwhelmed me, but electrified me at the same time.

And then I lost it.

Circumstances emerged that made the dream unsustainable. Even though I knew what my heart wanted, I felt pulled to remain on the path I was already walking. At first, grief overtook my body entirely. Over time, the longing softened into something quieter—a dull ache that settled deep in my chest.

That ache stayed with me for years. I felt it every day. Until one day, I realized I couldn’t carry it like that anymore. I decided to name the feeling instead of letting it fester.

And I did.

And then—nothing.

All that momentum that had built slowly, like snow gathering into the threat of an avalanche, went nowhere. But something unexpected happened. The pressure that had been caving in my chest lifted. I could breathe more fully. I could speak again.

That was acceptance—not as a decision, but as a bodily release that came only after disappointment had been allowed to land.

Eventually, the feelings I had stored in my body for so many years began to surface—suddenly, and without asking permission. My throat quivered as truth released itself. My body jolted with uncertainty, anticipation pushing outward after years of containment.

A heaviness settled in my chest. An ache that pierced, but also woke me to what was now possible. For the first time in a long while, I could feel everything I had kept pressed down.

I cried—loose, unguarded tears that seemed to arrive from nowhere. And I sat with that pain for months, trying to understand what, exactly, I had lost. I questioned how something I never fully lived could cause so much distress.

But that was the truth of it. Sometimes the disappointment of unlived potential awakens the senses more than ever walking the path itself.

There were days I tried to distract myself. But over time, I learned that nothing truly dissolves the rawness of emotion. We can numb it, yes—but like a wound left unstitched, it doesn’t heal. And neither do we.

So eventually, I stopped running. I sat with the feelings. I gave the grief time to metabolize, and in doing so, I realized it was shielding something deeper…disappointment.

The longer I stayed, the more the sensations began to shift. I could feel it in my body. My stomach no longer clenched. My chest softened, open and still.

From that place, I could look back without longing or resentment. Not even disappointment. What remained was resolve. I couldn’t return to what I had imagined—but I could move forward, grounded, toward a path I hadn’t yet seen.

Maybe this is what we all need to learn—not how to outrun our emotions, but how to stay.

To sit when sadness lands hard. When the ache in the body overtakes the senses. To listen to the same song on repeat not because it keeps us tethered to the past, but because it helps the body make sense of what it has lived.

To give ourselves—and one another, especially our children—permission to be upset. To be sad. To be disoriented. Without being told to toughen up. Without needing an answer or a solution.

To remind them, and ourselves, that feeling deeply is not a problem to fix, but rather a process to move through. Sometimes that’s all our children need to see—that even when the drop comes, we stay seated, breathing, right beside them.