Letting Go of Expectations

 

I'm well aware that I've gotten The Song stuck in your head, but I don't care because it's Friday and I've finished all my homework and by all lines of logic I ought to have written at least half a fresh chapter of my novel by now, but I opened the document at 1 o'clock and all I've managed at 2:30 p.m. is a batch of words so small that if I dumped them into Oliver Twist's empty bowl he would just wrinkle his freckled nose and repeat, "Please sir I want some more."

Me too, Oliver. So why can't I write some more? Why is it that I've fantasized about writing all week but when confronted with the reality of the blank page I find writing anathema to my very being? Why do I find myself in this situation nearly every week? Is this all there is, all there will ever be? Should I consign myself to this writing life of drudgery? Surely not. Surely creative joy is not destined to remain a mirage...

So, why?

Well this answer will seem tangental at first, but stick with me.

My sisters are high school seniors, and last weekend they performed Frozen, their last-ever play. One of my sisters was the head of set design and we had no issues there, but the other one--we'll call her "Jamie"--played Elsa, which for years has been her dream. Because Elsa has for so long been her dream, when her theater director announced that Frozen would be this spring's musical, my whole family expected Jamie to leap for the role.

She didn't, though.

My sisters have been heavily involved in their theater program for as long as they've been in high school, but when Frozen was announced Jamie told our whole family that she wasn't auditioning, not for Elsa or for any other role.

"I want to spend time with my boyfriend!" she screamed at my mom the on the eve of audition week. "I've told you all so many times, I don't want to spend my last semester of high school being trapped in a play I don't even care about."

"But you've always cared about the plays," my mom cried. She, like the rest of my family, was distraught. Here they had expected Jamie to finally take center stage as this imperious ice queen, and instead she was letting go of the opportunity for some boy most of them didn't even know.

"How could she?" my grandmother demanded of me. "This role is ideally suited for her personality!"

But that's not what Jamie told me the night before auditions.

Then, melted on her bed like an ice cube on the kitchen floor, she didn't blame her boyfriend. Instead she said, "I can't even do it anyway. I know everyone wants me to do it but my voice isn't right for it. I can't hit the notes and I hate the way my voice sounds on it, I hate it, and even if I do get the role just because I'm a senior, our whole family will hear me sing and it won't be as good as they expect it to be."

I nodded. I understood, because my family has always approached my writing the same way.

"You've always succeeded at writing," my dad assured me during my senior year of high school, when I expressed uncertainty about my decision to pursue a Creative Writing degree. "There's no reason you'll stop being good at it. You've always been driven. You'll just keep doing the work, and eventually success will come of it." 

He meant well. My whole family means well when they say things like this. And I'm glad they support me. I'm glad they support both my sisters and myself in our chosen creative fields. But to ears that have grown up on such lack of concern, their vapid assurances reveal an underlying expectation that my sisters and I will do the work, and do it well.

And such expectations leave no room to fail.

When perfection is expected from me now, as an adult, I'm well-lived enough to scoff, but my family's expectations were instilled in me when I was still young enough to mistake their faith in me for the belief that I was only allowed to pursue a craft if I knew I could and would be the best at it. I've internalized that philosophy, and while I recognize that the fault is now mine, it still confines me. I hate that confinement, I hate it, and my brain confuses that hatred for confinement with hatred for my craft.

The same thing happened to Jamie. That night in her bedroom I knew she wanted to audition, I knew playing Elsa was still her dream, but she was so terrified of making mistakes that she would rather have abandoned that dream to the amorphism of her own expectations than risk solidifying her mistakes in reality.

But it's like my dad said: the only way to achieve success is by doing the work, and the only way to do the work best is by making mistakes. But positive philosophies are infinitely more difficult to internalize than their negative counterparts, so that night I didn't bother reiterating it to Jamie. 

"Imagine the future both ways," I said, "and do whatever you think you'll regret less."

Was I overly proud of this advice? Yes. Of course I was. I still am. That's why I've included it here.

But it did the trick. The morning of audition day, I awoke at seven a.m. to the sound of Jamie singing The Song in her bedroom. Later that week she got the role, and when she performed last weekend, yes she made mistakes. Her voice cracked once and she and her cast mates fumbled a scene, but at all four performances when she emerged for the first time on stage, head bowed and eyebrows lowered with her hands folded just below her waist, a hush fell over the sold-out theater. An honest-to-God hush, like you give royalty. Think Westminster Abbey on Queen Elizabeth II's coronation day.

"She looks just like her," audience members whispered around me. My own grandfather didn't recognize her until after the first scene. When she belted her high notes the entire house cheered, and when she cried over Anna freezing to death a good number of people were moved to tears. After each performance a twenty-minute-long line of elementary schoolers waited to get their pictures with, "The Queen."

"I'm really really glad I did it," Jamie admitted to me at home, after the show. "I just wish I hadn't told my boyfriend not to come." She rewatched the recordings of herself at our kitchen table. "It was a lot better than I thought it would be. I can't believe I almost didn't do it, God I'm so stupid..."

She's not stupid. She just expected too much of herself. But if you'll recall, before the show Jamie had claimed to be paralyzed by our family's expectations. After the show, however, she didn't mention whether or not our family's expectations had been satisfied.

She only mentioned her own.

I'm not saying that my family's approach to creativity isn't flawed; it is, but in a society hell-bent on turning any and all hobbies into "side hustles", so is most people's. What I'm saying is that just like Jamie, I often hide my own unrealistic expectations for myself behind those of my family, only admitting to the existence of my own expectations until after they have been satisfied. So I have to wonder, how much writing have I missed out on just because I am unwilling to confront my own expectations and therefore let them go?

To take my own advice, at the end of my life will I regret it more if I abandoned the idea of my novel to the amorphism of my expectations for what it "should" be, or if I risked writing it into reality and making mistakes along the way?

When I put it that way...

It's 8:30 p.m. on Saturday and now I'm sitting on my living room couch. Jamie and my other sister are at their Frozen cast dinner and I'm waiting for them to return home. I've spent two days writing this blog post in place of my novel and because I'm still learning to let my unrealistic expectations go, that stresses me out more than you know, but fingers crossed that tomorrow's Callie will heed what today's Callie wrote and be able to write enough words of her novel to overflow Oliver Twist's bowl.

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Really, I apologize this was so long, but I warned you, this blog is for glorified journal entries and nothing else, and I feel that the experience of unrealistic expectations is universal, so at the very least I hope you somewhat relate.