This issue of Girls Like Us is a deep dive into disappointment, not as defeat, but as resistance. Positioned as an “ugly feeling” we’re told to suppress, disappointment becomes here a tool for rupture, a refusal to gloss over the gap between what is and what should be. Rather than urging productivity or blind optimism, the editorial team (Pelumi Adejumo, Persis Bekkering, Dagmar Bosma, Dora García, Jessica Gysel, Sara Kaaman, Katja Mater & Yin Yin Wong) invites readers to linger in the discomfort. In doing so, they argue, we expose the cracks in extractive systems and imagine new ways forward. This is not wallowing; it’s a reckoning and a call to feel, fully and collectively, toward something better.
