Tag: expect
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The Betrayal of Expectations: Coping When Life Doesn’t Go to Plan
“What will mess you up most in life is the picture in your head of how it is supposed to be.” ~Unknown
I expected to get into college. I expected to have a career after a lot of hard work, and that one day I’d meet a nice man and we would get married. We would buy our first house together and start a family, picking out a crib and the baby’s “going home” outfit and organizing a drawer full of diapers. We’d have more babies and go on vacations and grow old together.
I expected that one day I’d take care of him until he took his last breath, and then I’d join a travel group with other retired women. My adult children would come over for dinner, and we’d take a family vacation with the grandchildren every year. That’s how it all played out in my mind.
I had a linear view of life. You go to point A, B, C, and so on. You do what you’re supposed to do and you work hard. It was very simple, life with these expectations. Follow the recipe and then eat your dessert.
Spoiler alert: Life was only that simple until the universe pulled the rug out from beneath my feet.
It was an ordinary school day when my life fell apart. These sort of things usually happen on ordinary days.
My husband and I were both teachers, and we woke up before the sun rose to begin our assembly line of breakfast and lunch preparations. Afterward we’d wrangle children and get them dressed and ready for departure, which was basically like herding cats. Then, he dropped them off at their respective places. I picked everyone up after school.
In between all of that we worked and went to meetings and ran errands and bathed children and cooked dinner and tended to all the usual moving parts of domestic life.
Except on that ordinary day, none of it happened.
On April 27, 2016 I woke up and found my husband dying on the living room floor. Out of left field, in an instant, the life I expected was gone.
I never considered the possibility of becoming a thirty-four-year-old widow with a one-year-old who I was still nursing, a three-year-old barely talking in sentences, and a six-year-old only two months away from his kindergarten graduation.
I was thrust into an alternate reality of gnarled, tangled grief, and it was in this new place that I had the painful realization that the life I knew, the one that was familiar and most comfortable to me, was over.
My husband and I planned each of our children down to the day. We even had number four, the one who would never be, scheduled in the calendar.
But now I was a single mother. A widow.
It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but during this time I wasn’t only mourning the loss of my husband. Sure, I missed him so much that I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I lived my days in exile, not knowing where I belonged. The tediousness of my new life as a single mother wore me down to the bones. The loneliness that festered inside of me created a painful hollowness that felt hopeless; the unfairness of this cosmic roll of the dice made me want to give up more times than I would like to admit.
But there was something else I was grieving: the loss of the life that I expected to live. My dashed expectations. The trajectory of my life that was forever altered, now headed in an unknown direction that felt like it would surely kill me.
We expect our lives to materialize the way we envision them in our hopes and dreams. When life doesn’t go as planned, it can be difficult to reconcile the disappointment of our new reality. Resistance is the first defense. We don’t want to believe or accept the change.
This wasn’t the life I chose. I deserved something better, I thought. “This” seemed so patently unfair. Surely there were worse people who were more deserving of this kind of lightning to strike them instead—so why me? I clung to those thoughts and let them bury me deeper and deeper into the abyss. The resistance might have been the catalyst to the darker parts of grief.
It’s such a disappointing, embarrassing revelation when you realize that you never actually had complete control. It feels like you were lied to. All of those years you spent with your first-world blinders on, thinking that you could plan every detail. It was cute while it lasted. Now it just felt stupid.
I realized what expectations really were.
Nothing.
My expectations were never real. They were nothing more than thoughts in my head. Assumptions. Desires. Never guarantees.
It was always like that, but for me it had been on a micro level. Micro-disappointment, like not getting the job I thought I wanted. A relationship that ended. Losing a bid on a house. I never prepared myself for the real disappointment in life. Earth-shattering disappointment that makes your world crumble and introduces you to your new constant companion: pain.
We usually think the bad stuff we hear about only happens to other people. We’re aware that it exists, but not in our reality. Just an abstract thing somewhere else in the world.
Until it happens to us.
I remember how mad my husband used to get when I’d be surfing Facebook, bemoaning that so-and-so got a new car, or how in love a couple seemed to be, and why can’t we go to Hawaii like so-and-so?
“Everyone puts their best on Facebook,” Kenneth told me. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head. “So-and-so and so-and-so are madly in love. Look at how passionate they are with each other. Why don’t we hold hands like that?”
“We have three kids under five,” he said, rolling his eyes.
I wish Kenneth lived long enough to know that the so-and-so’s got divorced. He would have told me “I told you so.” And for once, I would have gladly told him he was right.
It’s memories like those that I like to lean into. Life can’t be as horrible or as wonderful as it appears in my head. There has to be middle ground.
When I’m feeling an extreme of any emotion, I have to remind myself of this. It’s just thoughts in my head. Sandcastles built out of feelings, and sandcastles get washed away when the tide rises and brings in a new day. It’s not a matter of being a good or a bad thing. It just is.
My expectations have been a thing that I’ve had to live with my entire life. I’ve always had high expectations for myself. Failure was not supposed to be a thing. As a widow, I found myself floundering in a new reality where I felt like I was constantly failing. Legitimately not capable of doing what I once could.
I wasn’t the same mother to my children. This new me had less time and patience. She was more tired and overworked and in pain. I had to learn to live with the limitations of my new life. My disappointment pooled inside of me like poison. Nothing I could do was enough. I wasn’t enough. Those are all very toxic feelings to carry around when you are already drowning in grief.
But there is only so much time you can spend falling deeper into your pit of despair. One day you realize that you are no longer falling and have in fact reached the bottom. There you are, alone with your despair, so sick of yourself that you can’t even handle your own negative thoughts anymore. You can’t take one more second of it.
This is your moment to get up and wash yourself off and start over.
When the despair stops roaring in your ears and you have a moment of quiet, you can begin to think objectively about your life. Your new life.
I realized what was wrong with me. My problem, I decided, came from my expectations. They were the root cause of my despair.
I expected a long life with my husband, even though he was always a mortal being who was never promised to be mine forever. I expected a lot of things, except for the only thing that was true about life: We are only guaranteed today. Yesterday is over. Tomorrow is unknown.
I knew I wanted to live as best as I could. I wanted a fulfilling life that was hopeful, joyful, and meaningful. I’d have to change my expectations if I wanted all of that. It was impossible to get rid of the expectations completely. I’m only human. Besides, expectations do serve a purpose. They’ve helped me in life. They’ve also hurt me.
The middle ground, I decided, was finding “flexible expectations.” I couldn’t be rigid in my thinking. I wanted to have standards and goals, but I needed to have wiggle room for the inevitableness of life not going as planned.
I had to become more resilient and strategic about my setbacks. I needed to have long-term perspective and not feel like individual moments in my life were the be-all, end-all. I needed to be less attached to a prescribed way to live.
You realize that in a world full of uncontrollable circumstances, the most powerful line of defense that you have completely in your control is how you think.
Your attitude.
Your perspective. Is that glass half-full or half-empty? You decide.
How you think is your resilience. Your ability to get back up and dust yourself off. The way that you know life is worth living, not only during the moments of joy, but also during the challenges and pain and heartbreak, and this is the reason you persevere.
Maybe my expectations never betrayed me after all. Maybe it was actually supposed to be one of my greatest teachers in life.
Around a year after my husband died, I sat down and made a list of “good” and “bad” from the past year. It had gone by in such a blur that I felt like I needed to go back over the details. I anticipated a pity party as I recalled all of the terribleness.
The bad: my husband died. Single.
The good: new friendships, a loving community who showed up for us when we needed them, trips to Japan and Italy and Denmark, saw an old friend for the first time in eleven years, more productive than ever with my writing, my kids were happy and adjusted little people, we had a nice roof over our heads, I loved my job that didn’t feel like a job, we were healthy, I worked on the election (even if it meant precinct walking with the toddler on my back as a single mother—but I did it!), and so much more. I kept thinking of new things to add to the list.
It was very telling. We tend to focus on the negative. My mind wanted to go back to the dark moments of the past year. But after re-reading the list, it was clear that the year wasn’t all bad. There were many bright spots in the hardest year of my life.
Mooji said, “Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.”
I try to always remember that.
It’s okay to feel terrible. You aren’t broken for feeling that way. You just can’t let yourself get attached to the feelings. There will be days when life feels too hard. You will feel pain and loneliness and fear that will make you suffer. None of it reflects who you are, nor are they any indication of what your future looks like. They are merely the temporary visitors.
When the feelings visit me, I acknowledge the pain. Hunker down. Maybe clear my schedule. Lower my expectations of productivity. Give myself permission to rest while I let the thoughts pass. Then I move on. It’s not that you ever forget the pain, but moving on is a way to compartmentalize it so it does not destroy you.
Eighteen months later, I’m a different person than who I was before my husband died. It’s not the life that I initially chose, but in many ways I am living a more intentional life with a lot more choice. There is some degree of excitement in what I call my “renaissance.” There are no rules. You just live as authentically as you can, with what you have, doing the best you can, and that’s it. No secrets.
Everything that you need to persevere is already inside of you, and this truth is liberating.
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How Self-Awareness Can Help Us Love People Just as They Are
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~C.G. Jung
We were visiting my parents’ place in the woods for the weekend. I unlocked the door to the cabin and flipped the switch. The lights didn’t come on, so I began rapidly flipping other switches. I hollered at my husband to come have a look.
He walked to the breaker box in the back. I heard popping as he flipped them on and off. He shouted every so often, “Try the front room!” I reported back, “Nope.”
“Try the bedroom!” I reported back again, “Nope.”
We did this for a few moments, then he came around the corner and said, “It’s a bad breaker. They’ll need an electrician.”
He walked out the front door and bent over to put his boots back on. I asked, “So it’s not something you can fix?”
He looked over his shoulder and replied, “I’m scared of two things—snakes and electricity.”
Then he pulled the leg of his jeans down over his right boot. I jokingly said, “There are only two? Aren’t you scared of me?” and I playfully patted his rear end.
He slid his left boot on, straightened his other pant leg, and stood up. He looked me square in the eye and said without smiling, “Yes, you too, when we aren’t meeting your expectations and doing things the way you like them done.”
The grin slid from my face and my shoulders slumped forward. His feelings were still hurt from my reprimand the night before. I made big sad eyes and dropped the corners of my mouth to look pitiful. He held his ground, “Hey, you poke at me sometimes; I’m just poking you back.”
Indeed, his words were like a hot fire poker rearranging embers in my gut. A flame caught and my fiery ego snidely replied, “I only do it in your best interest.” In his eyes I could see the wall going up. He sensed a lecture coming and turned and walked away.
I stood there alone in my pride. “Yes, I do push my husband and son to be better. So?” But in that moment my heart asked, “Better than what? They are already the very best gifts in my life.”
Some time passed. I decided a walk might clear my head and heal the hurt.
As I stretched, I heard my dad complaining in the distance. He was upset that someone had not done something the way he wanted it done.
He lectured my ten-year-old son about being irresponsible. My son wasn’t the culprit, but he still got a sermon about doing things “the wrong way.”
I assumed my dad had the good intention of teaching my son something, but his rebuke roused the mama bear in me. I growled, “Why is he putting his ridiculous expectations on my cub?”
Before I went to strike, I noticed the burden had an eerie familiarity. I suddenly realized that I was not upset with my dad; I was upset with myself. “That’s how I sound sometimes,” my heart reminded me. And I could see clearly what my husband was poking at.
I closed my eyes and turned my shame toward the sun.
I let my shoulder blades fall gently down my back to open my chest. I took in a deep breath of Leance and held it for a moment. I exhaled guilt. I inhaled forgiveness and let go of control.
In the stillness I acknowledged that I am broken, but I am not beyond repair. I can apologize for expecting my boys to be different than they already beautifully are. And I can take note of how I am hard wired and ask to be transformed by love.
We all have blind spots that impair our relationships. I’ve realized that the best way to gain insight is to pause and really listen when someone shares his or her frustrations with us. If we humble our egos and limit our lips, our eyes will often open wide and so will our hearts.
One way we can wake up to our blind spots is to begin noticing the situations that repeatedly make us mad. A situation won’t give us a charge unless it connects deeply to something inside of us. It’s our work to determine what exactly our anger is connecting to and why.
Once we have noticed what aggravates us, we can look within. “Where in my life do I potentially do something similar to this?”
If disrespect makes you disgruntled, where in your life are you possibly disrespecting yourself or someone else?
If being controlled makes you cross, where in your life are you potentially being overly controlling?
If injustice infuriates you, where in your own life are being even the slightest bit unjust?
Our world-changing work begins by looking within. It is from this place of self-awareness and authenticity that we can begin to truly heal our own hurts and learn to honestly love others just as they are.
Woman with heart image via Shutterstock
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How to Free Yourself from the Pain of High Expectations
“Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.” ~Rob Bell
During my pregnancy, I was the poster child for prenatal health. From taking my supplements and participating in birthing and breastfeeding classes to doing downward dogs up until three days before my birth, postpartum depression never crossed my mind.
I am married and financially and professionally successful.
I hungered to be a mom.
I have a robust community of friends.
I do not fit the stereotype of who is at risk for postpartum depression.
And yet, less than six weeks after giving birth to my daughter, I found myself sobbing and shaking on my bedroom floor in the middle of the night—incapable of getting up, incapable of taking care of myself or of my daughter.
To understand how I found myself in this position, it’s important to understand what happened leading up to my birth.
From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I began designing the vision for how I wanted to bring my child into the world.
This was going to be my greatest creative act.
I would labor at home as long as possible so that I could take baths and walk in my meditation garden.
When I finally arrived at the hospital, I had an iTunes playlist (think Yanni, Jack Johnson, and Snatam Kaur) that was to play while my husband rubbed lavender and frankincense essential oils over my body.
I did not want any pain medication. After all, my husband and I trained in hypnobirthing so that he could help me manage my pain.
I created a lengthy document listing my desires as well as what I most definitely did not want. I posted it in multiple spots in my hospital room and provided a copy to my obstetrician and each nurse who attended to me.
As you have probably guessed, my birth did not go according to plan.
From the moment I was told that I needed to be induced because my daughter was in fetal distress, I watched myself move from protagonist to bit player in my birth story.
Cervical ripening. Pitocin. Ruptured membranes. Epidural. Each of these medical interventions I abhorred the thought of I found myself submitting to as my labor stalled and my daughter’s breathing become more erratic.
Twenty-seven hours after my induction, I gave birth. Only, I did not feel bliss or even gratitude. I was emotionally exhausted, disappointed, and anxious about what would come next.
Within a day of my beautiful and healthy daughter entering the world, my cat of thirteen years exited it. As I grieved his passing, I found it difficult to bond with my daughter, particularly as she struggled to latch and my attempts at breastfeeding became futile.
My fragile emotional health ultimately compromised my physical health. After a lengthy upper respiratory infection and weeks of postpartum insomnia, I began to feel like a dark, unfamiliar force had taken over my body. And I had no will to do anything about it.
Fortunately, my mother and husband rallied to my rescue. They ensured I received the multiple forms of treatment needed to get back to me while my daughter was provided the nurturing that I could not give her at that time.
By five months postpartum, I felt whole again. I felt connected to my daughter. Fortunately, she felt connected to me.
I felt excited about my own and my family’s future.
Postpartum depression forced me to question everything I thought I believed about what makes me happy, what I want my life and work to look like, and what makes me feel worthy to receive love and happiness.
I am grateful for these lessons, even though the process to them was painful.
While I now know that I was unconsciously equating my success and self-worth with my birth experience, strangling one’s self with an unrealistic benchmark for success is most definitely not just a woman’s issue.
I do not want to allow myself to become prisoner to my expectations ever again.
And I do not want you to become a prisoner to yours.
Most of us struggle with how to create an ambitious and achievable vision for what we want for ourselves without getting our identities wrapped up in achieving them.
Whether we strive to scale a business, negotiate a salary increase, payoff debt, buy a house, or take a family vacation, the key to having aspirations that fuel us, that make us feel good, is shifting our expectations about the outcome.
First, we want to create goals for how we want to feel as we pursue what we are seeking to achieve.
Prior to postpartum depression, I had never realized that in both my personal and professional life my goal setting always revolved around achieving something I could check off a list. And unfortunately, whether or not I checked off that thing on my list, was in large part not in my control.
As a result, my feelings often operated by default rather than by design, and they were directly connected to my outward achievement.
If we want to set ourselves to do well and feel good, we have an opportunity to set expectations for how we want to feel going through the process of achieving our vision.
Had I done this during my pregnancy, I would have been lauding myself along the way for feeling healthy, creative, present, and so forth rather than pinning all of my success on the ultimate destination, the childbirth.
We know from neuroscience that our beliefs shape our thoughts, and our thoughts give rise to our feelings. We have an opportunity to decide we are ready to feel a particular way—i.e., grateful, inspired, or accomplished—and align our beliefs and thoughts accordingly.
Of course when we are triggered from something unexpected, upsetting, or downright devastating we are entitled to whatever emotional response is evoked. In these moments, we can observe our emotions moving through us without becoming them, or getting stuck in them, until we are back on the path we want to be on.
When we put our awareness on believing that the feelings we desire can and will happen, it empowers us to have moment-to-moment thoughts (even if there are some occasional interruptions) that support the realization of the feelings we are striving for.
This, ultimately, gives us a more solid base for realizing our expectations.
Second, we want to find a way to measure success that goes beyond yes and no.
To me, a successful childbirth was delivering my child without what I deemed were “unnatural” forms of medical intervention. I now realize how silly this goal was, given that it did not even address my daughter’s health.
Yet if I were to time travel back or at some point have another child, I likely would still strive to minimize many of the medications and procedures I experienced.
The key is the word “minimize.”
I would focus on minimizing medical interventions that were not needed for the emotional, physical, and spiritual health of my child and me.
That is very different, yes?
How can you create goals that allow success to be lived in the gray, very important space, between black and white?
Third, we must surrender in the wake of surprises and setbacks.
When we surrender, we make peace with what is, and we use our newfound awareness to expand our conscious capacity for how to move forward with grace and ease.
Note: This is not giving up.
When we have an expectation that clearly cannot be met, we may grieve the shedding or the reframing of the expectation, but we do not adopt embarrassment, shame, or guilt about what has happened.
We give ourselves space to awaken to the lesson, and then we incorporate it in how we move forward.
To recap, if we want to consistently preserve our self-worth and ensure our identity does not become enmeshed in our results, we begin by shaping expectations that set us up to be successful in multiple and holistic ways.
Then, we pause and pivot when expectations are challenged or outright dashed. We forgive ourselves for whatever role we played in the situation. And no matter what, we remember we are the protagonists in the story we choose to create about our lives.
Prisoner image via Shutterstock
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Are Your Expectations Setting You Up for Disappointment?
“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” ~Alan Watts
For a long time, I felt like I was standing on a riverbank just watching the water of life go by, too scared to jump in and play. I was waiting for the perfect current to come along that I could ride all the way to the completion of my intensely detailed life goals.
I didn’t want to move until I felt like success was guaranteed and I was certain it was the “right” thing. Life was flowing, and I wasn’t doing anything. You can never be certain about the future.
Around this time, I graduated engineering school, and instead of feeling excited and free, I felt like a large weight was dropped on my shoulders. I had a lot of expectations to meet, all of which were self-imposed.
After all, I had an engineering degree. By the world’s standards, I was bound to be successful, get a great job, and make money.
The thing is, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the path of engineering in the traditional sense was not right for me. I also couldn’t seem to function with the weight of these expectations. I got depressed, frustrated, and disappointed with myself for not pursuing engineering right way.
I expected myself to be successful, which eventually escalated into expectations of perfection in all the areas of my life.
One day, I was on a walk with my dad and he said to me, “Amanda, you just have to jump in the river and swim! You might wash up on the shore of the riverbank a little ways down, but at least you’re moving. Plus, you never know who or what will be there on the shore waiting for you. Just jump in and stop trying to set expectations for the future. Jump in and ride whatever current looks good now.”
That’s exactly what I did. Instead of focusing on what to do, where to go, and how I was going to accomplish everything I thought I wanted in life, I focused on releasing the expectations I had about it all.
I focused on what I wanted to and could do now. I finally jumped in.
The following are some tips and lessons I learned while making the transition from expectation overload to the lightness of exploration. (more…)
