Beneficial Expectations

So, I’m out on the town last night, and it’s getting pretty late, and it’s time to go home. A friend of mine was still there alone, and I asked if she needed a ride home. Not a pick-up deal or anything of the sort—it’s just a hell of a walk in the cold. She assured me she was well on her way, and that her ride was coming, and I was okay with all that.

Then she said something. “Expectation is the worst word in the English language.”

“It can be a hell of a bear,” I replied.

“It sucks—because you think people should be a certain way, or act a certain way, and really—no one is going to change their behavior.”

“I have to agree. Expectations can get you in trouble,” I said.

Some time ago, I was in a place where one paid a great deal of money to sort out personal problems of this sort. Trained professionals seem to have a one-track mind in a great many instances, and the situations which may arise from false expectations are no exception. I can’t say with certainty whether or not any amount of this type of counseling has been at all beneficial, nor can I stake a claim to its detriment. What I know is that in most situations, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to evaluate the events at hand, and there is almost always no one “right” answer…

There was one such instance where in a large group setting, about thirty or so of us were gathered in one place to try and figure out why we sucked. People were in the place sucking for different reasons, each one thinking they had some sort of individual monopoly on shittiness. It wears on a person after a while. There’s only so much of that mindset and beatdown that people can take. Well, only so much I can take, anyway. But there would occasionally be lectures, and we’d all gather in our collective shitpot to try and stir up the mess a bit so that everyone in the county could smell it. Maybe I was having a bad day..

The lecture that day was about expectations. It began innocuously enough, a rather young woman (I’d say she was maybe a few years removed from college, at most) was up there at the dry-erase board writing down keywords about this, that, and the other. And honestly, I just didn’t pay too much attention to that stuff most of the time. We were supposed to take notes, and reflect on this stuff after the fact, in our alone time. I took notes only to avoid the unnecessary embarrassment of falling asleep in this public setting. It would be a pain in the ass to do, because you wouldn’t get any good sleep, and then the wakeup call would be miserable in addition to everything else, once you caught your bearings and actually realized where the hell you were and what you were doing. So I took excellent notes.

And maybe fifteen minutes or so into this lecture about the demerits of expectation, how as I’d discussed with my friend last night that it can without a doubt get you in trouble. She then leapt toward the subject of individual expectations, and how we probably all needed to take another look at our relative standing in life, and how it should likely be adjusted to meet some revised and dumbed down version of ourselves. (That’s how I took it anyway)

“So, if you think you’re going to get out of here, and everyone is going to treat you with a higher degree of respect and trust, what do we say about that?”

Silence.

“It’s going to take a little bit of time to earn these things back. We can’t expect things to go the way we want them to go all the time,” the young woman would explain to what she must have perceived to be a group of mental kindergartners. Some people would talk slowly to you in these settings—set the common denominator ridiculously low. That added to an immense frustration in my day.

“So, if you think you’re going to leave this group, and eventually become Vice President of the company you’re working for, what would we say about that?”

More silence, but I was sure getting pissed.

“We should appreciate and be grateful for what we have, and be happy we’ve got the opportunity to work hard in any capacity we can.”

I’d had enough. “You know, I’m not here because I was kicking so much ass I felt like I had to tone it down a notch.”

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“You ask that question about being Vice President of the firm when we get out of here—Hell, that’s limiting in and of itself. Who are you to say that we shouldn’t gun for being the damned President, if in fact we’re the most qualified for the position?”

“That’s the sort of thinking that’s gotten everyone in here in trouble,” she started, and probably would have continued, but now, I was enormously impatient with her line of bullshit.

“No, it’s not. You’re promoting exactly the sort of thinking that gets everyone in here in the first place.” At the time, I had no job, no life, and no real prospects for the improvement of either. But I didn’t have to have anyone telling me to lower the bar a little..

“I don’t see how that’s the case.”

“No, you don’t.” Now I was kind of talking down to this poor young woman, who probably had never been challenged in any way of this sort, and it probably wasn’t fair to her, but she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “You don’t see how it’s the case, because I can tell you don’t really have any insight into what’s going on in these rooms, except for what you’ve read in some goddamned book, or what you’ve managed to absorb from whatever time you’ve been around here. And you just might be dead ass wrong about this. All I’m saying.”

Then she turned this thing around in the way that most psychologists and counselors will do, and challenged me to go ahead and take the lead here. Another miscalculation. “So, what is it that you’re going to do when you get out of here? What’s you’re plan?”

“I figure I’m going to set a series of goals for my life to try and get to a position where I think I should be. I might put Senator of the state of Kansas on the list, and I’m not claiming I’d be good at the job, or even that I would want the job, but I guarantee if I put something on that list, and it’s in my best interest to pursue it, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some constructed fear of failure dictate the way I go out and conduct my life. It’s all I’ve done for several years. I’m sick of it.”

“Well, maybe instead of Senator, you could think about running for county government or something like that.”

“You’re still missing the point. I just used that as a representative example. I don’t know what I’m going to put on that list of goals and accomplishments yet, but if someday, I want to run for senator, I guaran-goddamned-tee you I’ll go out and run for senator. It has nothing at all to do with my overall point, except that you’re continuing to try and beat people down a little more. I’m just saying it doesn’t do much good to kick a fellow around too much when he’s been flopping around in the dirt for years. It quits working.”

Hey, by now at least no one in the room was sleeping… “I think you’re setting yourself up in a dangerous way here, because you’ve got preconceived notions of what you think should happen, and..”

I cut her off, “See, you’re just not going to get it. What you’re telling me might work in your mind for 90% of the people in this room, but guess what? Ninety percent of the people in this room aren’t even going to make it a fucking year trying to solve exactly the problems they’re here to address right now. I’m telling you right now I’m not listening to the defeatism anymore. I know I suck. I didn’t come here to learn to come to terms with sucking. Not my style. I’m here to do something about it. I’m just pointing out an important paradox here, and I think it just might be important enough that someone else might have to hear it too. The only thing limiting me right now is me. Is that too much self-reliance? Maybe. But what choices do I have right now?

“And I’ll dabble a bit with the expectations of others too, now that you’ve got me going,” I continued. She was looking at me with a pathetic, ‘no one in the world can help this lost cause’ look. “What about all those other people around me that I’ve supposedly ruined through my behaviors? Those are the best people in the world, and I have to maintain a high degree of expectations from my family and friends, because they’ve done nothing except to exceed my level of expectation to this point. They’ve been great, and now I’m supposed to get out of here and be surprised that they continue to treat me like a human being? That’s bullshit.

“You throw out all those expectations of other people, and what do you have left? You’ve got a pretty big vacuum where your life should be, it seems to me. What if I go out of my way to count on someone when they don’t necessarily have to be there for me, but I know they will be there? We’re social creatures. Sometimes we need other people. Am I supposed to act surprised? Like that’s some sort of big fucking accident? I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. You have to have the good sense to know who is in your corner, and yeah, occasionally, you have to keep your guard up. But what about all those good things that come out of life when people meet and even exceed your expectations? What about the love, and the trust, and the hope? What about the fucking hope? This shitty construct you’ve got up on the board—I’m damned happy that at the end of the hour someone with some good sense can come in here and erase all that.”

By that time, I felt like I needed a cigarette, so I got up from the table, and that’s what I did. I wasn’t the only person to leave the room. I didn’t see that young woman around after that too much, and I certainly didn’t see her in a lecture.

And last night, I hugged my friend goodnight, and said goodbye to her, hoping against all hope neither one of us was left with an unreasonable expectation for the remainder of the evening.