Great Expectations

If you can be honest, I can be too. If you'll take the first step, I'll follow you through. But no one wants to bleed. No one wants to hide. No one wants to hurt alone inside.

I painstakingly drew every loop to each letter. When they didn’t look perfect I erased and redrew them over and over again, until I was certain perfection had been attained. But then the moment of truth—I received the handwriting assignment back to see that I’d gotten an A-.
I had the best handwriting of everyone in my 4th grade class. My best friend Stephanie even said my handwriting was better than her mom’s was. I was devastated. I sat in the backseat of our minivan and cried. In spite of my teacher’s assurances that I would still get an A in handwriting deep down I could not get over the trauma. If I couldn’t even be perfect at one of the few things I was actually good at I’d never be good at anything.

My life plan was set in grade school—in spite of my sub-par handwriting assignment I still had high hopes for myself. I would graduate college by 20. I’m going to be 21 when I graduate—missed that one. I would have a Ph.D. by the time I was 23. (I don’t where I was going to find the world’s shortest Ph.D. program.) I clearly missed that goal.

In my family, as in many families, there are unspoken classifications. My parents would never say it and I honestly am not even sure they believe, but from the outside and from my siblings you can feel it. I’m the “smart” one. My sister is the “social” one. My brother is somewhere in between. My grandma said I was her last hope to be a doctor. She told me that in middle school. My brother, sister and a cousin weren’t out of school yet either. I felt a little insulted for them that I was already her last hope. She really wanted to have one doctor in the family. I never liked science. She was pretty disappointed when I told her that. For a brief moment I thought that maybe I should try to be a doctor anyway. Then I realized that would be crazy. Living life to fulfill others’ expectations is ridiculous. Yet still it’s so easy to set high expectations for myself—and so much harder to realize it’s ridiculous.

Be strong. Don’t show you’re insecure. Don’t show that you’re hurt. If everyone assumes that you have everything figured out they’ll never see your weaknesses. Don’t admit you don’t know. Don’t care too deeply—you might be disappointed. I learned early the way to deal with failure—don’t try so hard. If I worked really hard at something and didn’t succeed I had truly failed. If I didn’t put in all the effort then the reality that I still wasn’t good enough wouldn’t be as harsh.

If I was not so weak
If I was not so cold
If I was not so scared of being broken
Growing old
I would be...

My sophomore year in high school I found this mean note under a desk talking about me by a girl who went out of her way to be my best friend. I didn’t tell anyone. Part of me didn’t want other girls to dislike the girls who wrote it because I didn’t feel want them to be offended for me. The bigger part of me was ashamed. I didn’t want to admit what they said because by repeating it seemed to become true. And what if those words were true? What if it was what everyone thought? I even helped the girl with her homework later that day. She didn’t know I knew. Maybe it was better that way. That night when my sister said how nice she was I said maybe she wasn’t that nice. I broke down and told her. The next morning the girl came to me crying and apologized. My sister didn’t like to see her baby sister hurt.

It’s easy to ignore things when they’re hard. Confronting them is the hardest. I can count on a few fingers the people I’ve yelled at in my life outside of family. The first time I started crying midway through and apologizing even though the girl deserved it.

My sister made some choices that she later regretted a few years ago. She told my parents and apologized but she never told me. She knew I knew, but she couldn’t tell me. It was easier to let my parents down. I had higher expectations for her than they had. We finally talked about it this year. She said she knew I would be so disappointed in her. It would be too hard.

I remember the moment in life I fully realized the expectations I set might be unreal. That people might not be perfect. It was watching the 5 o’clock news and finding out that a man who I thought stood for everything I believed in, who was an example of the person I wanted to become, had died from cocaine use. It was seeing the faces of the wife and kids he’d left behind and thinking of how he let them down. It was wondering how someone I’d thought was so great could have fallen so far. Then it was realizing that I didn’t want to remember him that way. I wanted to remember the strengths not the weaknesses. Humans are imperfect. As his wife said there was only one perfect person to walk the earth—he wasn’t it…and neither am I.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that, though. It’s easy to dwell on the bad moments of life—the hurts, the disappointments, the negative qualities of those around me of myself, the probability of failure, but those are the moments where my real high expectations of myself should be set. To remember the smiles on the faces of Mexican children who had nothing by my standards but were just thankful to God for another day. To remember the days when peoples’ smiles and encouragement meant the world to me. To remember that true failure doesn’t lie in failing when I try, but rather failing to try at all.

If I get up I might fall back down again
we get up anyway

-Anna