I grew up in a predictable, picturesque little town—the kind of town in which an iconic sitcom bar where everyone knew your name could actually exist.
My town was like any other of its ilk: the bowling alley was the “place to be,” there was only one clothing store, and every teenager worked in one of either of those two hot spots. It was a safe, stable place to grow up, with skinned knees, tree forts, and stream wading at the core of every childhood—a place where nothing bad ever happened. I was, therefore, desperate to escape the second I reached adulthood.
It’s easy to save money when you’re 18, about to graduate, and don’t have any bills to pay. My part-time job cleaning hotel rooms was financially lucrative and mentally numbing—ideal for a wandering, wanderlustful mind. As I robotically stretched countless fitted sheets over mattresses and buffed innumerable mirrors, I planned all the details of my upcoming adventure: first, a flight to England. Maybe a dalliance in Paris. The endless possibilities that Rome might offer. Adventures abound.
Operation: Flee Small Town Life took place faster than most of my friends and family anticipated, and I was on my first ever international flight out of my comfy little town, dreaming about the possibilities the world could offer, before that first summer of freedom was over.
As the plane took off, expectations had already started to form, and I was too young to know better. I was too young and inexperienced in life to know that expectations, while fun to dream up, can be severely and painfully crushed before your eyes.
They can be dangerous.
Travel, excitement, and adventure were taking up a lot of mental space for me as I stared out at the clouds from my window seat, but there was another new development that had me literally shaking with anticipation, a development that I’d kept mostly quiet from my circle at home.
There was a boy, and the expectations billowing up around him were already getting out of hand.
First love
We’d met through school, but he’d returned to his home in England months earlier, and our friendship blossomed into a relationship over emails and late-night online chats. Finally, after nine hours crammed next to an apparent lover of oily, stuffed olives who’d claimed my armrest as his own, I was tired and slightly desheviled as I made my way to my next adventure—the smiling, handsome boy waiting for me at the gate.
That first love is so potent. It’s powerful and intoxicating, and I fell as fast as I did hard. I was in dangerously deep before I’d even noticed how far I’d fallen, and without going into extensive detail, I’ll just skip ahead to the first major plot point: the untimely engagement.
I was still just 18, if that’s any indication of how whirlwind this relationship was, and he was older. That isn’t to say he was old; we shared the same generational interests and habits. He was still young, too, but he was just old enough that he was ready to settle down and wife someone up.
That someone was me, apparently, and while I know I was loved for who I was and not for the convenience of it all, I wasn’t quite there yet. I still had dreams and goals and absolutely no idea how I would achieve them, but being a wife at 18? That wasn’t in my plans, no matter how poorly made they were.
Being 18 means that you are officially an adult, but in so many ways, you’re still a child. I was inexperienced in virtually every aspect of adult life, and my introversion and propensity to lean on excessive politeness meant that I did, indeed, find myself engaged at 18.
Engaged. At 18.
This is not 1782. A woman’s value is not dependent on marrying young to a man of fortune. I knew this undeniable truth despite my total naivity, but I had no idea that my intrinsic value as a young woman was still maturing and adapting by the time I’d locked myself in. I needed time and space to grow, and I snubbed it all out by saying “yes.”
I loved him, but doubt began to build the moment that little word eked out of my lips, and I didn’t know why.
This is where expectations started to crumble. The man I loved was not entirely who I thought he was, although that doesn’t mean he wasn’t and isn’t a wonderful person (he’s actually one of the best men I’ve ever known)—he just didn’t know how to handle me. He didn’t know what he was getting into.
The problem was that I also wasn’t who I thought I was. Even I didn’t know how to handle me. I learned that my expectations for life were falling apart all around me at the same time they were shifting and morphing into new ones. It was confusing — is confusing — and expectations were ruling my life.
So I ran. Literally. I packed up my bags and made my way home—back to my quiet little town. Back to a world without excitement. I had broken everything I had built, and I ran from it all.
Cocoon
After spending a good month hiding under my covers in my little twin bed, in my little quilted cocoon, I emerged. Slowly, I started building a life again. But I was no butterfly.
I finally went back to school, but I was two years behind my friends. I was also tainted, stained by my decisions and failures, which felt immeasurable in my young mind. On my trip to Europe, I travelled less than I’d wanted to, and I returned from abroad with nothing to show for it. I was up to my ears in student loans, studying a subject I wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue. But I just carried on, blase as can be. Indifferent. Apathetic to my own existence.
Expectations had become something to fear. I couldn’t expect to graduate, fall in love, get married, have kids, and have a great career. That was a life all wrapped up in a tidy bow that felt impossible.
I’d failed too much already, and I was only 21. I’d lost hope. So I did what anyone who’d lost hope does.
I spiralled.
Chaos
There’s nothing quite like being in your twenties and feeling like you’ve spoiled your life already. I had a failed engagement that everyone knew about (small towns; they’re like that) and was behind in life in all other aspects.
To say I felt like a failure is an understatement. It was the perfect mindset for chaos to thrive in, and boy, did chaos ensue.
My love life was a joke. I dated a lot—and I mean a lot—and spent far too much energy on people who were wrong for me. Toxic relationships and drama were my specialty, and I was unfairly good at attracting the worst kind of men.
Expectations crept in again, the sneaky buggers. My expectations flitted from man to man, showing me glimpses of someone who might be gentle with my shattered little black heart, and then took flight again when it was clear that my heart wasn’t safe. From man to man, I spent years trying to fix broken people, years nurturing crushed souls, all because of my expectations.
The person I should have been fixing was me; the crushed soul that needed to be reborn was mine. Instead, I spent years missing opportunities, falling into addiction, and breaking my own heart over and over and over again.
Recently, years after I finally sorted through the sticky mess that was my life, I realized that I had been ignoring something so vital in those days, something that could have saved me from all of the pain I’d gone through.
Something that had been staring me right in the face the whole time: my carefully crafted expectations were responsible for so much of my life’s pain.
Butterfly
I would love to tell you that I had a beautiful rebirth and emerged as a stunning, brilliant butterfly.
I can’t. I didn’t.
I was reborn, though. I did eventually bust out of my lifelong cocoon, but I was ugly. I was mottled and purple and angry, like a newborn baby snatched out of her happy little home before she wanted to leave.
It took some serious time and effort to get my wings to finally open; to manage even a hint of a flutter. It took years of introspection and solitude. It took honesty and judgement and gentle, yet firm, direction. In order to fix my life, I needed to drop the added weight that my expectations had been burdening me with.
I am, by nature, a planner. I had my entire life planned out, and when life didn’t follow my plan, I flailed. Did I learn my lesson yet? Of course not, and in true self-destructive fashion, I shoved the pendulum all the way to the opposite side.
When my life was spiralling and my expectations were severed at every turn, I learned a new bad habit: my expectations became consistently bad. I was a professional at envisioning and armoring myself for worst-case scenarios.
When you spend your time dreaming up all the terrible things that will surely happen to you, particularly if your earlier life is premise enough, I don’t have to tell you that it’s a pretty bleak outlook. I decided that if I could just expect the worst in every situation, I would be able to handle the disappointment better. It would be expected, and therefore it would lose the element of surprise.
I didn’t like to be ambushed.
Here’s the thing about bad expectations, though: you’re still left with a crippling fear of the worst, even when you expect it anyway.
Let go
I don’t claim to have all the answers. I barely have my life together as it is.
I have learned a few things, however, about expectations and where they belong. It’s simple: stuff them in a sack and forget about them. Even if you think you are in complete control of your life, there are too many factors at play — you can’t accurately predict a single outcome.
Now, don’t get cute. Obviously there are scenarios in our lives that we can latch our expectations onto — you can expect to love your baby more than life itself. You can expect to fail your calculus exam if you skipped the entire semester. You can expect Keanu Reeves to continue to be the coolest celebrity that has graced the earth.
But you can drop the expectations that harm you, especially those that others put on you. I was expected to be a wife at 18, but it wasn’t the right path. I was expected to pursue a career in art, but fear of mediocrity held me back. I expected to be a world-famous journalist by the age of 30 — shit happens.
Expectations hold no value; having none is better than having even the most detailed worst case scenarios mapped out. I used to think that by expecting the worst, I was smart — I was prepared. But it’s far better to expect nothing at all. Whatever the outcome, you are at least not let down by a dashed hope. And if it’s a good outcome?
That’s just a pleasant surprise.
That butterfly that escapes the confines of its cocoon doesn’t have any expectations — not even to fly. It just opens up its wings, and it flies. It doesn’t hang there, overthinking and fretting that “a few short weeks ago I could only crawl and now things feel different, but what if I fall?”
Of course not. It just lets go and leaves the rest up to the universe. And it flies, because that’s what butterflies do.
Jane Austen said it best in Sense and Sensibility, as she wrote about Elinor and Edward, and more specifically with regards to Elinor’s family’s hopes for their mutual attachment:
“She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.”
Carrying around expectations only leaves them open to disaster, while letting go of them leaves space — space for virtually anything. When you free yourself of weighty expectations, you become light as a feather. You become open to endless possibilities.
When you let go of expectations, you can be as light as that butterfly and let the universe do its thing.
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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