6 min read
mood: honest
📐
The Gap
Everyone grows up with expectations. Your parents have them. Your family has them. You have them for yourself even if they are not written down somewhere. Maybe it is a goal. Maybe it is just a quiet one day I will do this or buy that or give this to someone I care about. It is human. We all carry some version of a future we hope for.
But what happens when no one actually expects anything from you. Or worse, when they hand you this idea that you can do anything and be anything and then reality shows up and hits you in a way you were not ready for. Because that gap between what people told me and what was actually true nearly broke me more than the surgeries did.
But what happens when no one actually expects anything from you. Or worse, when they hand you this idea that you can do anything and be anything and then reality shows up and hits you in a way you were not ready for. Because that gap between what people told me and what was actually true nearly broke me more than the surgeries did.
🔕 Be Strong. Do Not Feel.
🔕
Be Strong. Do Not Feel.
The expectations I got as a kid were not about my future. They were about my behavior. I was expected to be emotionally regulated. At an age where most kids are still figuring out how to share toys I was expected to sit in a hospital bed and accept my fate without crying. Do not be scared. Do not be sad. Just get through it.
And I did. I got through it every single time. But not because I was okay. Because I buried everything. I shoved every emotion down so deep that from the outside it looked like I was handling it. I did not know back then that feelings do not disappear just because you hide them. They wait. They pile up. And they come out later in ways you do not expect and cannot control.
That was the first expectation. Be strong. Do not feel.
And I did. I got through it every single time. But not because I was okay. Because I buried everything. I shoved every emotion down so deep that from the outside it looked like I was handling it. I did not know back then that feelings do not disappear just because you hide them. They wait. They pile up. And they come out later in ways you do not expect and cannot control.
That was the first expectation. Be strong. Do not feel.
🎭 Be an Inspiration
🎭
Be an Inspiration
The second one was be an inspiration.
I heard that word so many times growing up. Inspiration. Example. People would look at me and tell me how inspiring I was. How brave. How I was proof that you can get through anything. And every time I heard it something felt wrong but I could not figure out what.
Now I know. It felt wrong because I did not choose any of it. I did not wake up one morning and decide to be brave. I had surgeries because I had to. I endured pain because there was no other option. I showed up and dealt with it because the alternative was not dealing with it and that was not a real choice. There was no moment where I decided to be an example. I was just a girl going through something hard and people turned my survival into their motivation.
That is a weird thing to carry. Being someone else's inspiration for something you had no say in. Like being congratulated for getting hit by a car because you managed to stand back up. I did not want to get hit. I did not want to stand up and be a symbol. I just wanted to be a kid who got to feel her feelings and let them out when she needed to instead of performing for an audience that needed her pain to mean something.
I heard that word so many times growing up. Inspiration. Example. People would look at me and tell me how inspiring I was. How brave. How I was proof that you can get through anything. And every time I heard it something felt wrong but I could not figure out what.
Now I know. It felt wrong because I did not choose any of it. I did not wake up one morning and decide to be brave. I had surgeries because I had to. I endured pain because there was no other option. I showed up and dealt with it because the alternative was not dealing with it and that was not a real choice. There was no moment where I decided to be an example. I was just a girl going through something hard and people turned my survival into their motivation.
That is a weird thing to carry. Being someone else's inspiration for something you had no say in. Like being congratulated for getting hit by a car because you managed to stand back up. I did not want to get hit. I did not want to stand up and be a symbol. I just wanted to be a kid who got to feel her feelings and let them out when she needed to instead of performing for an audience that needed her pain to mean something.
🧶 Tangled Up
🧶
Tangled Up
And the expectations I had for myself got tangled up in all of that. I could not tell the difference between what I actually wanted and what everyone told me I should want. Be strong. Be grateful. Be inspiring. Okay but what about being scared. What about being angry. What about being a person who does not have it all figured out and is just trying to get through the day without pretending.
""Untangling
I am still untangling it. The external expectations from the internal ones. The things people projected onto me from the things I actually want for myself. It takes time to separate who you were told to be from who you actually are. Especially when the performance started before you were old enough to know you were performing.
I was never trying to inspire anyone. I was just a girl trying to survive. And if I had been allowed to cry when I needed to, to feel what I was feeling without it being someone else's lesson, maybe I would not be spending my adult life learning how to let those emotions out for the first time.