Great Expectations : What Are They

After a substantial amount of journaling, I have come to realize that more than anybody in my life, I have the greatest expectations from myself. I hold myself to such a high standard that I have this internal desire to hold myself to that level.

I feel like a failure sometimes - perhaps because I deserve it. I didn’t perform well enough. I didn’t try or practice harder. I said some things I shouldn’t have - all these things resulting to the feeling of disillusion in myself.

Working out, goofing around with friends, trying to make money, working on real-world projects - even after doing all of these things I feel incompetent, and that may be because I am.

This is what the result is when you hold yourself to such relentless ideals of life and don’t accept anything else.

And in some way, I think we all do. I believe we all hold ourselves to such heights.

The only difference is that some people articulate it and run after those dreams and quality of life like our lives depend on it and some people keep it in them and let it pass by, dismissing it as an everyday thought.

And some people get satiated with their current quality of life, and that’s okay.

But to go from “okay” to great, you must hold yourself to a high level of agency.

It feels like inner crucifixion, consistently every single day.

You try to make yourself into something you are not, like forging iron in a hot fire.

But only with the great heat and the strongest strikes, does the iron become into a sword, a force to be reckoned with.

It’s no longer a petty block that sits idle in the corner, “oxidizing” and “wasting”. Instead, it becomes capable of death - the strongest ability that one may posses. All metaphors are just that- metaphors. I do not support any form of violence which may harm another human - we must love each other to make it out of this life satisfied.

And like that iron, we must too be forged into greatness. Except the only hard part is that we are both the blacksmith and the iron.

Why The Fuck Do We Do This To Ourselves

These aspirations and great expectations exist only because we want to become better and we know we can.

We have this desire to win, to become better than our friends, to somehow become the all-knowing leader.

And some may not have this desire and as I said, choose to be the decaying iron bricks, slowly being erased from existence.

The compulsion to improve is a desire we all have once we reach the lowest points in our lives.

After a certain low, if we do not have to means to self-soothe, we make the drastic change.

We keep raising our ideals, higher and higher every single day.

And then we calm down after we come to terms with who we have become.

But some will never halt in this journey. These people will keep going, higher and harder every single day.

Because they realize that we are all mortals and we will leave this world to the standard we lived up to.

They know in 3 generations they will be erased from memory, but that is okay, because they made their life worth living. They perfected the sword and used it when the time was right.