Expectations
I’m the kind of person who expects a lot. No, not from other people. I try to expect as little from other people as I can and praise them when they succeed. From myself, from life, I expect the most. I push myself to do more than my best, to give more than my all. Otherwise I fail, falling into the abyss.
I have an image of what I want my life to be like. I might not get there, but it’s the image I keep in my head to remind myself of what I’m doing here. I don’t want my life to be a waste. I don’t want to sit at home all day and do nothing. I want to force people to feel emotions. With whatever I do, emotions must be felt. Otherwise there’s no point to it.
I want to be the kind of person people remember. Even if it’s only one person, I want them to remember me and think, ‘man, she was great.’ I want to look back on my life and feel raw emotion from everything I said and did.
This mental image that I keep in my head pushes me forward. Yeah, it probably won’t turn out like this, but, hey, I can hope.
I graduate from college with a degree in English and literature. From there I start my first business; a bakery. It’s a pretty bakery, with lots of flowers and pretty pastel paint colors.
I love to bake. Having other people taste my creations and think, ‘this is really good!’ would make my day.
So, I’ve graduated from college and started a bakery. Business runs smoothly for a while. Maybe I take some yoga classes and do some photography. Then, one day, a guy walks in. He’s perfect. Maybe he’s an architect, or an artist. Maybe he’s a photographer or an actor. Anyway, he’s doing something he loves.
He has dark brown hair and eyes. He’s tall, not scrawny, but has some muscle. Maybe he wears glasses. Anyway, regular guy. But smart, funny, and intelligent. That’s my perfect.
He asks me what he should order. I say he should get the almond tart. He asks me why. I tell him he should get the almond tart because my mom made it every Thanksgiving, and the first time I tried to make it I got impatient and burned it. Now, however, the recipe is perfected, and it’s amazing. So he orders the almond tart. Then he leaves.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. First, you’re thinking this is pretty far-fetched. Yeah, it’s a huge cliché, but I don’t care. It’s my fantasy. Second, you’re wondering why he left. If he’s this awesome, perfect guy, you’re wondering, why did he just walk out of the store after he ate his tart?
He left because he had finished his tart. It’s that simple.
But, the next day, he comes back again and orders another slice. So we get to talking, and he comes back every day after that and always gets the almond tart. Then, one day, I tell him to get the chocolate ganache tart because it’s better than the almond tart. He says he doesn’t think anything could be better than the almond tart, but I force him to get the chocolate ganache because, really, it is better.
Now, you’re thinking, stop rambling, kid. This is getting annoying. So I’ll stop rambling and get to the point.
Flash forward a couple of years, and we’re married, working together in my bakery. I’m pregnant with our first kid, but we don’t know the gender because I don’t want to know. I want it to be a surprise.
Flash forward a couple more years. He’s got this awesome job, doing whatever he loves, and it doesn’t matter if it makes a ton of money or not because it’s what he loves to do. I’m part time stay at home mom and part time famous author. I wrote a series, and everyone loved it. We still own the bakery, but we don’t work in it as much anymore. We hire high school students over the summer to help them save for college.
Flash forward again. We’re getting old, maybe we’ve retired, and our kids have their own kids. I’m still an author, writing books whenever I feel like it. We also do a lot of photography and art.
There are two places in my life that, at some point in my life, I need to live at. The first is back in Washington State, where I can watch the rain come down and not have anyone talk about how the rain is so dreary and how much they hate it. I love the rain. I love the smell of the rain, the way the clouds cover the sky, the feel of the rain on my skin. I don’t mind having it rain forty-three days straight. For me, that’s awesome.
The second place I want to live is Rhode Island, on the beach. I want to feel the humid air and the hot, white sand on my feet. I want to dip my legs in the water and feel the cold water chill my skin. I want to have a beach cottage, with white and blue walls and big curtains.
Then, I get old. I die. Maybe my husband dies first, or I do, but it doesn’t matter. At some point, I’m going to die. That will be okay. I’ll have done all these things in my life. I’ll have completed all my expectations, and when I don’t expect anymore, I’ll leave this place.
So those are my expectations. Of course, there are other things tucked in there that I want to do. I want to sky dive. I want to meet Yo-Yo Ma. I want to play Clair de Lune as my graduation piece. I’ll get to do all those, but I have to keep expecting as much from myself. Otherwise my life won’t have mattered to me, and I’ll keep expecting, but never receiving.
I won’t be able to fulfill all my expectations. At some point in my life, there will be a hurdle I’ll have to cross. Maybe I’ll do the right thing, maybe I won’t. But I’ll have to be able to forgive myself when I fail. Because there are more roads to cross, more things to do, and I can’t stand still and wait for something to happen.
So I work. I do more than my best, and give more than my all. I expect more from myself than I do others. I do everything I can here, because when I leave, when I die, all those bars are lifted, and nothing else really matters.
Expectation is really just a word. Its definition is an ‘anticipation of something happening.’ And that’s really all this was. With these expectations, all I can really do is hope they’ll happen, working toward them like goals. Maybe they never will happen, but at least I’ll have something in my head, something pushing me forward.
