Piling of Expectation

After school in my 20's when I was developing my mental landscape, I had to deal with the very confused and very loud set of (often contradictory) expectations in my brains built in headphones. Like a lot of Americans I had not grown up with the clearest rubric for understanding things (both emotionally and a deeper understanding of how things work). I had a big appetite for learning, and so I ingested much: newspapers, books, music, movies, talking to strangers at shows, people at parties, teachers, friend’s parents, but all that input wasn't filed away within me so much as it was gathered in a pile. "To File Later." I learned some things I liked, some things I didn't, characteristics I wanted to embody and ones to be wary of, the pile became plural, but always there was a strong draft in the room, blowing my piles around.

When I was 10 and entering chat rooms online, my "a/s/l" was always 15/m/Houston. This me had a vague blonde girlfriend and an H-top convertible Camaro and life was great. That was as far as my 10-year old brain could imagine life building towards. I was desired by someone desirable (and blank), and had a fast and cool car. That I wouldn't actually be old enough to drive it is a good indicator of what kind of equipment was available in the lab where this idea of success had formed.

Then as it were, I become that age and didn't meet my chatroom fantasy metrics, and it didn't feel quite as bad as my 10 year-old self might have imagined. Funny enough, at 16 I had a blonde girlfriend and a stick shift civic with a sunroof and a 6 CD changer, but I didn’t even think of it. I considered any opinion formed from that part of my life as a funny story. I didn't check in with it at all. No self-esteem was added or removed.

I was actually pretty happy at 16, because I felt like I was a man of great meaning. I was a writer in a school where most people didn’t feel that pulled towards anything. I felt outside the norm, and I loved that. I wrote most of the High School talent show skits, I published a book of my poems, I ran for and won Senior Class Vice President (which I then resented that they wanted me to attend meetings), I had a car with a sun roof (which honestly was really cool), I went to concerts with my best friend instead of going to prom. I felt special in many ways, and on top of all that, what doubts or fears I had were always waved away because of how much time I had left in life. Not even out of high school yet!

I remember figuring out how to game the system in school. I took early-bird classes and doubled up on science so that by senior year, my last period was study hall, I would do all of my homework for the day, maybe even work on a poem or two and then leave school an hour or two early. I would take a nap before going back to school for track practice. After that, I had the nights to myself. Often I would read and sometimes I’d just sit in my chair and think. And my thoughts tended towards wonder. That was a very contented time, but it was also a time when I was not particularly challenged, and hadn’t faced much if any hardship. Even so, I suspect my contentedness derived from feeling so accomplished among my peers. My comparative status was high and unique. I knew I stood out on an application. I’m sure many people my age also grew up focused on things that would look "impressive" on a college application (not that it was our idea). Having taken those things down first, I had time and space to explore other things.

Let's go back to 20's Greg, fresh out of college, living in Austin and taking his first steps outside of the scaffolding of school. Those first few months, I was really tortured by my thoughts. The contemplations and wonder I had in my high school evenings was replaced by a panicked, hunted feeling. I needed to make things happen, and fast, but they also had to be smart things, the right things. I needed to figure out how to game the system again, but I was only just now entering it.

Before arriving in Austin, I imagined an opportunity would present itself to write, or perhaps, I expected it to happen matter of factly. Put another way, I hadn’t thought about it at more than daydream settings. When I actually got to the work of looking for jobs (I was even worse at it then than I am now, if you can imagine), things instantly felt bleak. My college internship didn’t seem to get me interviews, my poems didn’t get me opportunities, because apparently in the world there were tens of thousands of people with poems. I felt overwhelmed in a way I had only ever felt doing college applications, and then in my first years of college, re-adjusting the game of that system. But this was an entirely different thing. I had to make every single decision, when to sleep, when to wake, what to eat, where to go, exercise, play, socializing. I realized I didn’t really know how to do any of it without the tracks of the standard middle class path.

At 16 I had only my childhood expectations to contend with. I didn't consider them, but if I had, I had met them. But after college I was faced with the expectations buried within all of my piles. The chorus of contradictory advice that can only be culled one voice at a time.

I thought it would continue to be easy. After a few weeks, I realized my college serving money wouldn’t last more than a few months, and that I guess I’d have to serve here as well. But that wasn’t a simple declaration for me either. It felt like a failure at first step. I was always told that serving was a young person’s job (nevermind that I was still extremely young, lol) and I wanted to be beyond that like I was in high school. Beyond everyone’s expectations. Only there wasn’t any around to have expectations of me except me. And maybe my parents. I remember them calling to check in and feeling like I couldn't possibly share with them that I was freaking the hell out. That actually I didn't feel very good about myself and didn't know what to do, could barely function, pacing the apartment with a belly full of crossed wires. It was often sort of like

Parents: "how's the job hunt?"

Me: “well you know, the job market is still recovering or whatever, they kind of either want a lot of experience or they don’t pay” (this was the heyday of internship labor exploitation)

Parents: “well how are you on money? Are you going to be able to cover rent?”

Me: [shocked and angered they didn’t immediately offer me money] "I’ve got it under control! If I can’t get a writing job soon, I will get a serving job, even though I really don’t want to.”

Parents: “Ok, well if you’re still having a hard time, maybe we can help you out.”

Me: [it’s too late now, of course, I will never forgive the transgression] “That’s ok, I have this under control. Don’t worry about me.”

I didn’t know how to talk about these sorts of things, and I still struggle with it. Now I have a better understanding that I’m an ADHD-er in a normal people’s world, but I’ve only come to that understanding recently. Back then it was a tangled labyrinth of expectations from the margins. JOB INTERVIEWS? Talk about inscrutable. The interviewers are insincere, they ask trick questions, they find any reason to eliminate you. There’s nothing normal about that system, but a mind with less piles, with a better mental organizational system just accepts it as a game. Learns the rules and moves on. To me the rules were distasteful, corrupt, unprincipled.

I eventually found a serving job, after hemming and hawing over the different restaurant listings and the idea of dropping off resumes in person like a scared lil pup. I got an interview at the bistro around the corner from my apartment. The manager wasn't much older than I was and he seemed to want to hire me even before I went in. It would turn out to be one of my favorite jobs I've ever had. I would make friends I have to this day. And all of my lessons and successes would be linked to the baseline of working there. The writing would come and it would go, but that serving job gave me self-sufficiency. At that time Austin was a cheap place to live. That was one of the main reasons I chose it after the financial ruins I graduated into.

I wrote a novel that year, to show myself that I wasn't a server now, but a writer who will make it sometime very soon. The novel was terrible and writing soon became another sensitive subject. A source of a lot of insecurity and shame. Something I once felt accomplished at, but now felt woefully underprepared for. And so I began to experiment with making art. I had always been a maker. I designed that poetry book back in high school (it was called Black and White, and it read from either side, all the poems on the left black ink on white background and visa versa), I made a frame wall of cool nat geo pictures with frames from Ikea I painted, I knit a scarf for a girl I was into, I learned to cook in college to feed my roommates and maybe impress a potential partner. And so it made sense that I started making cut-paper art. I didn't have as many emotional barriers to art, and so it didn't feel so vulnerable.

I wonder how I would have felt to make poems about my anxiety and fear of failure in Austin. Maybe it would have been the first step towards building the honesty and vulnerability I would learn to value as I grew up. But I wasn't there yet. And so I hated my novel. Ultimately I didn’t like not being good at it. Writing poems always came pretty easy, and a novel was infinitely harder. It requires organization, requires a rather large time commitment, requires patience and a lot of dedication. And so art allowed me to explore a different part of myself. I was suddenly productive again. I made bigger and bigger pieces, got a gallery show, sold my first piece, experimented with light fixtures, with depth, and then eventually I had the idea for Shipwreck, a nod back to writing. I had always loved to write and send emails and letters, and it seemed exciting to connect the two again.

And as the years go by, I never fully reckoned with the idea that I still carry a lot of those old expectations. That I try to clean the bathroom, or mend my socks, while I watch a soccer game, that every time I remember a craft I wanted to do, or a book I wanted to read comes up, that I don’t just feel reminded, but feel shame. Why didn’t I do it already? Was I ever going to get to it? My age started to become a cudgel. "Here we are, another year, and you’re what? Somebody who has a niche card company, and spends a lot of time by himself. Who has a lot of dreams and ideas that he only occasionally follows through on. You’re 30 now. You’re 33 now. You’re 38 now, time to get going, you haven’t accomplished enough, you can’t even manage the barest of your expectations." WELL THAT’S JUST IT.

The expectations are actually just critical voices. They may sound as if they care, as if they want to hold you to your potential. But ultimately they keep me from being present. They are the soundtrack of not accepting myself, sometimes even self-flagellation. At some point the opportunities of life became heavy, burdensome. "You’re a writer? Well what have you written? You’re an artist? Well why aren’t you popular? You think you’re a fun and beautiful person? Well why are you alone?" The expectations are violent. 

It’s not a zero sum game. It is not that you can’t expect, can’t have standards, can’t account, but there is no actual success and failure in life. It’s a gift we are given, but there is no objective waste in it. A person may judge another to have wasted their potential. A system, like capitalism may call someone foolish for not taking a financial opportunity. But ultimately, these are schematics we place on top to try and make heads or tails from an open ended existence. And coming to terms with that, not just intellectually, but emotionally, has been the most powerful part of therapy for me, and something I will be working on for the rest of my life. That actually I am full of arguments, bursting with different people’s perspectives, and my emotions have hidden themselves within those expectations that I have held myself to.

That actually my lack of emotional regulation made me lose control in Austin, and then in New York, and even in Philly. I’ve been thinking my feelings so I didn’t have to feel them. Or perhaps even more bluntly, to pretend I wasn't having them. Even in being diagnosed with depression, it gave me the protection from my feelings. They're a chemical imbalance, I can't help them.

It’s only in better understanding my emotions that I can see the patterns I wasn’t clear eyed enough to identify. All the reasons I had a hard time committing to writing, the way I was making decisions in my life from a place of fear and comfort, and why I continued to always feel so exhausted and overwhelmed. It’s because things needed to be addressed about how I felt. And I was never really given that language or that support in my early life. Slowly over the years, by good example of friends and lovers I learned the basics, but it wasn’t until I crossed the threshold of being actually quite honest about my feelings-- not explaining them away, not worrying about other people seeing them, not making them seem smaller, just holding it still, admitting it exists--that they became more manageable.

And now, I am working on my expectations. Not from an emotional place, where I’m almost 39 and I might want to “give up” on finding love, because it’s safer to remove the expectation. Rather, I’m in touch enough to know, I still want that, and I may fail again, may be 40 and still single, but that it’s not foolish to want love. It’s not foolish to fail. Trying is really all there is. And I want to try at life to my very last day. That is my one real expectation.