The Weight Of Expectations

Having a good level of English and having grades that always made people say “Good work!” and made praise come easy when I was younger. Teachers would smile while reading my work, family members and other adults would say things such as “She’s very smart.” or “Her future is bright.” . At first the applause felt satisfying and simple. Glory felt like encouragement, like the warmth of the sun you feel on your skin without realizing you’re getting sunburnt.

It took awhile for me to realize that praise has a strange way of changing over time.

When you hear people praising you often, it starts feeling like something you have to maintain rather than something you recieve. Without even realizing it, you start to carry the weight of a responsibility which is to stay the same person others believe you are.

This person is the girl who always does well, who has good grades, who understands everything so quickly. This girl is the girl that people expect to succeed at everything.

At some point the bravo stops feeling light and start feeling heavy. Heavy like the weights you lift in the gym that are obviously too heavy for you but you just have to keep going or else your trainer yells at you. A mistake you do feels larger than it is. It becomes hard to differentiate if you’re working hard because you want to become the best version of yourself or because you’re afraid to fall short of the image that the community built for you.

Well, the strange part is nobody actually asked me to carry this weight. It sort of happened on itsown. It forms gradually, piece by piece. It takes a lot of comparisons and the quiet belief that if you were capable of getting praised once , you should always be capable.

Ambition and enthusiasm can be a beautiful thing. Aspiration can make you feel euphoric. It pushes you forward and gives you direction. However, it also creates a pressure so silent that you can’t even realize it. It gives you the agonizing feeling that every achievement must become a standard you must live up to.

And sometimes the hardest expectation to carry is not the one others place on you, but the one you place on yourself.

Once you become used to being “the one who does well,” it becomes difficult to imagine what it would feel like to simply be someone who is still figuring things out.