When Things Don't Work Out How We Think They Should
Where do we go from here?
To be human is to have expectations about how we think things should be – how a friend or loved one should show up for you, what a “successful” life looks like, or who should win an election. A simple binary for what is right and what is wrong. Anything that lives outside of what we grant our approval is good, just, right, acceptable. And anything else? The greatest disappointment.
While, often, these expectations are rooted in a logical understanding of what is best for us, or the collective, they do not always align with reality. When an expectation goes unmet, it automatically brings disappointment. And I don’t know about you but lately, life has felt like a continuous thread of disappointment. I expect people to act a specific way, and they don’t. I expect life to play out in a specific way, and it doesn’t. I don’t get the job, the guy never texts me back, I get a bad haircut, a president is elected who should have never been on the ballot. I expect something and it doesn’t happen – then what? How do I move forward when it feels like life is continuously knocking me down?
When everything in my life feels out of my control, the only thing I know to do is focus on what I can control – where I place my attention, how I spend my time, what I give my energy towards. And in moments like this, I try my very hardest to focus on the good. I take note of the grief I am feeling, both collective and personal. I observe the resistance I have to feeling any uncomfortable feelings. I hold the space for the process of disappointment, frustration, anything that might be coming up and I continue to move forward placing my energy on the goodness that lives within my life because it is the only thing that keeps me going.
Even while trying to focus on the good, on the things I can control, it is easy for my mind to drift into dread when coming to terms with all of the unmet expectations in my life. I get frustrated at repeated relationship patterns, I question why people can’t just “do better,” I feel bogged down by the weight of the world and unsure of the likelihood that things will get better. I get stuck in the frustration of my reality not meeting a certain expectation time after time again. My mind spirals with thoughts about how I got myself here in the first place, why I keep attracting the same dynamic, what action can I take to get a different result. I return to the binary of good and bad – forgetting that most of life lives within the gray.
But just as when I am in the depths of a social media spiral (scrolling mindlessly for hours, fingers glued to my phone as if my phone is some sort of hypnosis-inducing device), I cannot stop until I place my attention elsewhere. I lock my phone, throw it across the room, and do something else. Lately, I have been weaving a simple tapestry but sometimes I grab a book. If the energy feels really heavy, I start playing my favorite song and dance and shake and throw my body around my apartment. I shake up the waters of my being in order to lift myself out of the spiral. Until I place my attention elsewhere, I know I will continue to spiral down, down, down into the depths of my existential dread.
I don’t think the problem is so much the expectation, but rather, the association labeling the expectation being met as good, and everything else as bad. Another way of saying, the suffering I experience comes from resisting the reality I face. When I think about this collectively, I don’t think this means to put your hands up in the air and allow injustices to happen but rather, managing your expectations and instead of focusing your energy towards the countless things you cannot control, focus on what you can.
And when I think about this personally, I think about all of the micro and macro ways I am trying to use my own expectations as a way to control an outcome that I have no control over. Instead of thinking over and over about what went wrong, I think about why I expected something from someone who I knew wouldn’t be able to show up for me in the way I expected. I’ve learned that it is part of my responsibility as a human to keep these expectations in check. It is something that continues to come up as a hindrance to my relationships – I often confuse my standards and my expectations and unfairly expect everyone in my life to show up for me in the same way (unfair and also unrealistic).
I’m currently reading Enchanted Love by Marianne Williamson and she writes,
“I realized then that the problem wasn’t that this man behaved a certain way; the real problem was that that particular behavior garnered my disapproval. It was not his action, but rather my own closed heart, that was causing me pain. The problem, at the deepest level, was not that he hadn’t called, but that I thought he should.”
The process of integrating your disappointment, and managing your expectations, is a constant discernment over what’s happening in your mind at any given moment. There’s no practice that you can do to immediately feel better, especially when the weight of our collective grief seeps into every breath we take. But, I have found lightness in being able to release my grasp on the need for my reality to look one singular, hyper specific way. Instead, I look at the reality that is in front of me, I take it in for what it is, and then use that as information to decide how I want to move forward.
As I continue to process through my relationship with expectations, and the disappointment for things working out differently than I thought they would, I return to my practices with extreme gratitude. I am grateful to have containers that hold me through my grief and my joy. It is a privilege, yes, but it is also an incredible act of resistance that plants seeds towards a future vision that contains liberation for all. I will not let the weight of the world keep me from moving forward with intention, with an open heart, with the belief that a better world is possible. Each day, I wake up, grateful for the things that I have which can never be taken away from me – the connection I have to myself, and my faith in a higher power protecting us all. Those two things, as well as my belief that even when my expectations go unmet, life is always working out exactly as it should, keep me moving forward. It fuels the fire behind my back and reminds me of my purpose as a human – to love, to love, to love.
When my heart feels heavy, bruised, or filled with fear, I gently remind myself that the most healing presence in this human existence is love. I must continue to give it freely. I must remember that no love I give is ever lost. I must love through the disappointment. I must continue to open my heart, to hope, to trust, to believe in the impossible. For love is the guiding force – the heart is our beacon guiding us towards a future that is better and brighter for all. I must trust. I must love. I must continue tending to my heart so that it is overflowing with love. That is the most important work we can do. Love can heal all.
What is an act of care I can provide myself this week? What is an act of care I can provide someone else this week?
How can I use the difficult or uncomfortable emotions that are surfacing as information/fuel to show up differently in my life? What is this teaching me about myself?
What expectations am I holding onto? How is that keeping me from accepting the reality of things? Can I reframe the expectation to hold space for reality and my own needs?
What am I grateful for? What feels good and easy in my life right now?
When life feels completely out of my control, what are the things I can return to to feel more grounded?
This song makes me feel like dancing – if you’re feeling a lil down or a lil heavy lately, maybe this will lighten your load <3
"I shake up the waters of my being in order to lift myself out of the spiral." beautiful<3