somewhere between expectations and hope

“You shall become the person you are.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Picture from Pinterest

From childhood, we grow up trying to live up to everybody’s expectations. And from there, we’re always fighting to become a person who maybe doesn’t even represent ourselves. It’s hard to find who you are, what you want, and what you actually love — because most of us spend years chasing a version of ourselves that someone else designed. Life after life, we search for something to fill us, but we never quite reach the point where we can finally rest in peace — not like dead, but like living a peaceful life. The kind of life where you have no more panic attacks, no more confusion about who you are, no more lowering yourself for others’ amusement. Where you know who you are and what you need to do.

We hope for something better. But better how? What kind of life do we actually want? My dad once told me to dream big, and I’ve wondered many times — how big should I actually dream? Can I be Elon Musk? No, right? But the real question is: why do I need to be Elon Musk? I can be someone else entirely. We wish to become somebody, but no one can become anybody if they don’t first know what already lives inside them. We chase after big things and forget the small ones — the ones that gave us laughter, purpose, and peace.

From person to person, from job to job, I’ve seen so many different expectations placed on me. My own expectations — from life, from people — have mostly stayed the same, but everyone else seems to want something different from me. Someone wants me to be a badass. Someone wants a gentleman. Someone wants a giver. Someone wants a protector. I tried to be all of them, and in the end, I failed — because I couldn’t satisfy everyone’s idea of who I should be. What they dreamed up of me, I couldn’t become. I never stopped to ask why; I never expected anything from them in return — I just kept hoping they’d understand me. That the effort and dedication I showed would be recognised. In the end, it meant nothing.

And maybe that’s the quiet tragedy in all of it — not that people expected too much from us, but that we handed them the pen and let them write who we were supposed to be. We waited for recognition rather than developing our own definition. We measured our worth by how well we fit into someone else’s picture, instead of asking whether that picture was ever ours to begin with.

That’s what life actually is. We learn from it, we understand, we think. No matter how much you cry, how much you get hurt in the process — in the end, life is like trying every flavour of coffee in a coffee shop: you won’t love all of them, but each one teaches you a little more about your own taste. The trick is understanding yourself. Instead of searching for yourself through other people’s eyes, try living your life through your own. Between hope and expectation, the version of you worth becoming is the one only you can define.