My great expectations
Know thyself, said the Oracle at Delphi
Expectations are everywhere.
And amongst all of us.
Whether we are school age or retired, within our families, friendship circles and our romantic relationships, our workplaces and universities.
They are the human forecast system that enable us to make plans, set agendas and so on.
They are a normal, taken for granted part of life and we each have them to a more or lesser extent about almost every aspect of our existence. They are linked to our sense of self and help fuel our motivation for work, study, social interaction and all of our daily choices, big and small.
However, it is no coincidence that expectations are often framed alongside the word tyranny, due to their weight and significance on the human beings that carry them.
I found the expectations of school almost entirely overwhelming.
At school, I found the expectations almost entirely overwhelming, because as most small children do, I wanted to please the teachers and adults that surrounded me. When I discovered that I struggled in many subjects, I began telling myself to narrow down and work harder in the areas that I could do well. Music, art, maths and anything science related were all written off as I decided that I would never have the aptitude for any of those subjects and instead threw myself emphatically into languages, history, geography, literature.
On top of the expectations related to doing well in my classes, the social aspect of school was even more of a minefield. I was not interested in girls magazines or fashion and loved to play imagination-based games with my friends, which was not the way to fit into the group I perceived as ‘cool and popular’.
On one hand, I was glad not to be in that group, because I did not share their interests, but at the same time I was devastated to realise I must be an awkward social misfit who did not fit in with the ‘cool kids’.
My story that I am somehow ‘uncool’ or undeserving of popularity is one that sits at the root of my social anxiety, often needing a space where it can be aired and validated before I can regain confidence and self-belief.
Expectations are the enemies of equilibrium and optimal well-being.
Expectations are seemingly the enemies of equilibrium and optimal well-being and my extraordinarily thoughtful parents set about challenging such expectations in friends, family members, my sister, each other and themselves when we began to home educate. Throughout our years at home, family discussions around met and unmet expectations were commonplace. Mum and dad fully engaged with our academic, creative and vocational choices by questioning us and letting us know if they thought we were making decisions based on anything but our fascination or love for a subject.
Mum and dad distilled and simplified their own parenting expectations to that of wanting to give us the tools to expand our self-knowledge so that we might explore our own curiosity. They armed us with skills in emotional resilience by demonstrating how crises can be met with mindful awareness and ultimately they worked incredibly hard to instil within my sister and myself the courage and confidence to lead what Brené Brown would call a ‘wholehearted life’ (2011).
As I have become an adult and gone through my twenties continuing to follow this philosophy, I become more awed by my parents’ example.
Parents everywhere model their own happiness and wellbeing on a daily basis.
Mum and dad did this by running their own home-based business, a life-coaching consultancy which they worked around our family’s home education activities. We felt like the priority but we also saw them take time for themselves every day, usually by meditating and taking walks, a ritual that neither of them would ever miss. Mum would also have the odd window to spend on her art and my dad would normally have a music project on the go, or he would be going for his beloved Sunday night football kick-about.
Surely if I could just get there, wherever there is.
I emigrated to California nearly a year ago and I have found myself falling prey to the tyranny of expectations once again. Falling into mild depression I kept telling myself stories that couldn’t be true, like how I should be faster at adapting to life out here, how I should have found my ‘Californian tribe’ already, that I should be volunteering regularly for good causes and that I am clearly wasting my life. They are all a slightly updated version of what I felt during my home education days and have always felt, that I should be a good person with a good community, always giving of myself and at some point, ready to be some kind of big success in some unnamed field. Surely if I could just get there, wherever there is, I would have done it, completed something. Yet here I am, in the happiest, most loving relationship of my life, with the absolute privilege of taking each day as it comes. Not having any expectation from anyone (other than myself) about how I choose to live my life.
As human beings, we have the consciousness to plan a future and it motivates how we spend our current day, hour or minute.
But in our busy, information-saturated lives, this future-oriented consciousness can all too quickly become toxic and overwhelming.
Rates of depression, anxiety (of all kinds) and other mental health issues are at epidemic levels amongst every generation.
Even if expectations are not imposed in their home lives, social media and assessment-driven schooling is clearly contributing to the psychological malaise experienced by so many children and teenagers.
The tyranny of expectations accumulates and we are left feeling divided, apathetic, fragmented and separate.
Here are four suggestions that helped me:
- Talk to children and teenagers, discuss the fear of missing out or FOMO,(such a prevalent modern day phenomenon that its acronym is used every day by the millennial and post-millennial generation.) (Hermitanio, 2019)
- Check in with how they are feeling, whether there are warning signs of depression or social anxiety and look at yourself to find your own sensitive spots, your own triggers, we all have them.
- See where they are at and then where you are at, what people fear and what they value, check in with yourself.
- Be aware that if we are comparing our lives to the ones we see online, younger generations will likely be experiencing it even more powerfully.
These comparisons can become pervasive, corrosive internal stories manifesting as terrible anxiety, depression and frustration preventing us all from becoming who we wish to be (Grant 2019).
Like Marie Kondo’s philosophy for cleaning, it is crucial to find what ‘sparks joy’. I loathed the nature walks my parents would drag us out on and despised the views they would often stop to admire for interminable minutes, but now I am a sucker for both.
I would roll my cynical teenage eyes when my mother would lovingly reorganise our nature display table or when my father would revel in cooking our evening meal, two things I now adore doing. I sketch, telling myself as I do that am completely capable of good art.
When I dance, I do so freely, shaking off my story that I am gauche and uncoordinated.
Radical self-care begins with a space for the layers upon layers of expectations that we have built around our core selves.
They underpin so much of who we think we are and cannot be nuked or simply eradicated. They need to be heard and validated, acknowledged, reflected upon and gently questioned. Only then can they start to unravel and can we start to get out of our own way, one tiny pernicious expectation at a time.
It is daily practise to be still and reflect on the present without projecting into the future or ricocheting into the past thinking it will solve current dilemmas. A practise that I will often miss because it is easier to scroll through social media or surf the internet.
It is daily practise to note the expectations I accumulate about people, my environment and myself and practise to let them go.
It is daily practise to remember that I have the confidence to explore what intrigues and excites me, to recall the resilience to overcome life’s random challenges and to step fully into the privileged freedom I have been given, time and time again, to prioritise my own happiness.
References
Brown, B. (2010). The Power of Vulnerability. TEDxHouston. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability . [accessed] 20th April 2019
Grant, A. (2019) Stop Asking Kids What They Want to Be When They Grow Up. [In] The New York Times [accessed] 24th April 2019
Hermitano, M. (2019) ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ And Abundance Of Information Narrow Global Attention Span, Researchers Say, [in] Tech Times. [Accessed] 25th April 2019
Kondo, M. (2014). Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up . Ten Speed Press.
