Expectations

Hello, I am a girl of 17 and recently made my first anonymous blog - www.writeitdown.blogspot.com in which I write about various issues that I think are of interest to all teenagers. This is my first post, I will be happy if you visit my blog, I hope the editors will publish this, the blog is completely anonymous. I have a feeling that my existence was based on living up to other people's expectations. Expectations that I did not set for myself. Why can a certain action at a given moment cause countless different expectations in the future from the people around you? I realized that a person is much happier when there are no expectations. This way you are not disappointed, and if things still go in the right direction, then you are pleasantly surprised. That sounds pretty simple. But in reality, people still have expectations, not for themselves, but for you. And the worst thing is that if you don't live up to those expectations, you're just a big disappointment. And not only for your loved ones, but also for yourself. Because you accept all these expectations for your goal, which you have to fulfill at any cost, you overwhelm yourself with them, and at one point they become so many that you can't catch your breath. At some point you lose track of what is really important, what you want. Other people's expectations begin to control your life. Just think how many people expect something from you. And how many of them you are able to disappoint. But what is the point of our existence being based on other people's ideas about it? Throughout our lives, each person adds a brick of expectations to us. Brick after brick, and our task is only to place the concrete between them so that everything does not collapse. Finally, after all these years, we look at the finished wall. But we don't like her. She is not ours. We thought that this is the wall that will provide us with a stable future and happiness? The truth is that behind this wall are all the missed opportunities that we neglected because we were busy with other people's dreams, with other people's expectations. But it's too high now, we can't skip it, it's too late, we can't knock it down. And are we satisfied in the end? We have a solid wall and that's it. We don't have to do anything, it surrounds us everywhere, and we live there, in a small world that we can even call our comfort zone, even though we don't like it. We live all our lives with other people's expectations, we are used to them, we are comfortable. We know that it is not right, but we are still not doing anything about it. Yes, it is definitely painful to tell your loved ones that you do not want this. At least for me it was. For as long as I can remember, my father expected me to study and do perfectly, to be good at absolutely everything. And I did. I can say that this is one thing I am good at. I felt good because my father was happy too. At one point, however, I started doing just that, thinking I would be useless otherwise. That was the only sure thing in my life. So how could I be useful at all if I didn't make someone else happy? I didn't know how to be happy for myself. To neglect your whole life, your friends, even your health and sleep, just to become a machine to live up to expectations? This was my daily life, my happiness and unhappiness. But like I said, everyone has expectations of you. People in my class, my friends started going out without me. I moved away from everyone. I was too busy with my father's expectations. But no one understood it that way. Everyone expected me to always be happy, fun, full of energy, to always be ready for the next gathering with alcohol and chalga. I was like that too. I added another expectation. I started dating people who weren't nice to me just because it was expected, I started pretending not to notice some things, I started pretending to be stupid because they liked me more, I just didn't go that deep. And I thought I was happy with all these fake people. I was expected to be happy with them. Everyone wanted that, and I had it. I had to be happy. Over time, I added a few more expectations to my list. And everything was perfect. But no matter how well you juggle between different aspects of your life, at some point you will miss something. And so it happened. At one point, I just realized that no matter how happy I looked from the side, I wasn't. I wasn't with the people who were always by my side, I wasn't doing what I really love, I wasn't what I wanted to be. And I decided to tear down the wall before it was too late. I stopped trying to be perfect in everything, I started studying for myself, grades stopped being the most important thing. I stopped going out with toxic people who only drained me emotionally. I am no longer a learning machine, no matter how unhappy my father is. I'm no longer in the busiest company, but I'm with people who really make me happy. This is my far from perfect world with no expectations. Honestly, I don't care so much what it looks like from the side anymore. The only expectations I want to live up to are my own, which will help me become a better person. To be really happy and no one expects it.