Expectations

What is it with expectations in this society?
As a student of anthropology, I am convinced it's a part of our culture.
That being said, some of our expectations are messed up.

We hold that certain life events should happen at certain times, E.G.: start kindergarten at age 5, start driving at age 16, graduate college at age 21, be married and start to have children by 30, retire at 65, etc.

What about those who didn't start driving until later in life, like in their 20's? Or those who want a college degree, and have started taking credits, but still haven't graduated by the time they are 35?
Or those like me, who haven't had children by 30 and got married after 30?

I think that having expectations to live a certain way and have boxes that they are always working to check off causes a lot of undue and unnecessary pressure for people in modern American society. The interconnectedness of our social-media-driven world certainly doesn't help -- we can always see what the Joneses (or, to my younger millennials, the Kardashians) are up to, and we feel inadequate in some way if we are not as successful as those that we see elsewhere.

Worst of all, there aren't many messages out there that say that we are perfectly fine NOT fitting into those molds and following those recommended ages for things. The number of messages is growing, but the prevalence and persistence of the opposition are so deeply ingrained that many of us keep hearing a voice inside our heads criticizing ourselves for not getting x, y, and/or z crossed off by a certain age.

Articles that say things like "31 things women over 30 shouldn't wear" or "If you're a woman over 30, you need to stop saying these things" are being churned out so fast and popping up all over social media automatically as they are published (including Pinterest!) and then summarily consumed by people who are accustomed to being told "this is what you're doing by this age" so it's not questioned.

My life hasn't followed any sort of expected path.
Well, lately it hasn't.
I went to kindergarten when I was 5. I finished high school in four years, during which I learned to drive, held my first job, and had my first romantic relationship. (Lettering in academics was not something "expected" of most youths, though it was in my house, and, of course, "good little Becca" didn't let her parents down in that respect.) Right after graduating high school, I went to a four-year institution.
It was then that things got messed up. :)

I didn't get a degree from that institution. In fact, 14 years later I still don't have more than an Associate's Degree, and that I earned five years ago. I dated my now-husband ten years before we got married, and our nuptials were exchanged last November when I was 31 and he was 33. The only child we have is a furbaby. I've had a car repossessed. We live paycheck to paycheck. We rent an apartment and have zero savings.
We are not the poster-children of the ideal American life.

My husband didn't even get his driver's license until he was 23 -- after I taught him how to drive.

But here's something that we have going for us: we are learning to say "fuck 'em" in regards to the people who are apt to speak up and say, "You're over thirty! You should/shouldn't be..."

I have done a lot of self-work on learning to accept that I'm okay and my life isn't a complete even though I'm not living according to what society wants or expects of us.

I've also done a lot of work with learning to not throw in the towel when things aren't perfect, or to accept that I don't have to stress myself out to ensure that everything is perfect.

I'd like to say that I broke free of all this nonsense.

I haven't.
I still have anxiety over worrying that people expect me to always get everything perfect or if they will perceive me negatively. (Some of that has to do with their implicit bias toward overweight, white-perceived women, or my perceptions of what their implicit biases probably are.)

So if you are one of the people who are affected by the stupid, inane expectations that our culture holds, please know that you ARE NOT held to them -- you are doing the best you can. I promise.
If you aren't happy with what/how you're doing, then seek help on changing things up -- but only if it's what YOU want. Don't do it for your mom/husband/neighbor/boss. Change for you and only for you. All that said, you should change only if you want to. If the expectations held FOR you are the same ones that you hold for yourself, then you're good.

There's more I could say on this.
Like how it's women that are mostly affected by this. (Or at least that it's more socially acceptable for women to be held to these expectations. We have expectations about our expectations.)
And how these expectations spill over into what we eat and how we dress.

I'll save those for a later post. This one's already long enough.