Growing Older With Frustration
When I put on an angry face, it’s not because I’m angry. When I put on this face, I am usually frustrated. My greatest frustrations are with myself. I ask myself deprecating questions like: Why am I so clumsy? Why can’t I remember to do this process correctly? How many times do I have to do a thing before I finally do it the right way? More often than not, the person I’m most frustrated with… is me.
As I grow older, I find myself bumping into frustration more often than I ever expected. I recently returned to work in the banking profession, a field I’ve known for most of my life. Yet the tasks that once felt instinctive now leave me wondering what on earth has happened to the muscle memory I used to rely on. It’s as if my brain occasionally misplaces its reading glasses and then pretends it never owned a pair.
Frustration is mystifying to me. I’m beginning to see that I often choose to blame myself instead of recognizing the truth: frustration builds in the gap between how I expected things to go and how they actually unfold. It’s not always a matter of competence; sometimes it’s the collision of timing, instructions, stress, or simply being human on a Tuesday.
Most often, I realize my frustration stems from situations where communication is either thin or tangled. I’ve noticed that when I ask a clarifying question to ensure I understand a task, some people respond with, “Oh, never mind, I’ll do it myself.” But my intention isn’t to escape work, it’s to do it correctly. I don’t need hand-holding; I just need the map. It’s amazing how quickly frustration melts when someone simply explains what they actually want.
And then there are the misunderstandings, the silent kind. The ones where someone walks away instead of talking things through, leaving the other person blinking in confusion. Movies use this sort of miscommunication to build tension, but real life doesn’t come with a neatly scripted resolution and popcorn.
At the end of the day, frustration isn’t proof that I’m broken; it’s proof that I care. I want to get things right. I want to understand. And I want to keep growing, even if the growing pains occasionally make me roll my eyes at myself. I’ll take that trade. It means I’m still learning.
I’m learning that frustration doesn’t get the final word. Instead, it invites me to pause, breathe, ask better questions, and remember that growth rarely comes wrapped in convenience. If I can meet frustration with curiosity instead of self-criticism, I just might turn my biggest stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
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