Dear Expectations,

Late Wednesday night, as sleep flooded my thoughts and my lamp flickered, I looked down at my last assignment of the night: my letter to my future self. Although this same task was presented to me at orientation, the weight of this one felt heavier since I no longer had restrictions on space. My immediate thought was what I wanted to ask myself, yet this question is very daunting. I panicked as I began going through the list of things I wanted to accomplish. What if I fail? What if this letter reminds me of all of my failures? What if everything changes from now till then? One might think I am overly dramatic, but I can’t help it; my anxiety controls me. This causes me to set unreasonable expectations for myself, and as I wrote my letter, that’s what I initially did. From the simple question of “how was senior year?” to distinct ideas for future careers, I bombarded my future self with all the expectations I felt I needed to set. As I read it back to myself, those daunting thoughts of not succeeding came up again, and I was forced to confront how my future self would perceive this letter. This concept also came up in class on Thursday when we discussed how many of the men during WWII wrote to the college about their opinion of women being allowed admittance. Some of these men wrote sexiest things that are not received well today yet at the time seemed acceptable. Although the Special Collections staff could speak with one of the men they obtained letters for, that is not the case for most of those men. What we know about them is what we have in writing, which can quickly help shape your opinion of a person. Luckily for many of them, we can also learn more from their yearbooks, which give us a history of what they accomplished in college. I thought back to the questions I had initially written for myself the previous night. All the questions were about what I would accomplish. I had created a set of strict instructions on how to live my college experience without having even been here a month. Not only that, all my questions were things that a yearbook could answer. Everything I had asked was shallow since I had so many passions and wanted to know which was the right one to follow. I was so concerned with what I would accomplish materially that I forgot what makes me, me: my enthusiasm to explore. If future me reads that letter, she will panic, the transition from college to adulthood is already stressful, and now I am essentially making her evaluate which of her lifelong passions are futile. Luckily that is not the letter she will be reading because that one is at the bottom of my trashcan.

Late Wednesday night, as my light continued to flicker, I had a sudden burst of energy as I began to write myself the perfect fairytale. When I was a kid, my father used to make up stories about whatever was troubling me so we could work through it together, and the issue seemed less scary. I decided to do the same with the letter. I crafted a tale about a magical forest that is supposed to reveal a person’s purpose, to help them get on the right path. However, when a girl with too many passions decides to use it to pick just one, the forest implodes, and although she doesn’t know what passion is right, she knows she has people around her who will support her regardless. I could spend hours trying to create the perfect expectations for myself, or I could choose to set just one. Find people who will support the ever-lasting pursuit of your passions, whose view of you is even more positive and lovely than your own. This is the only expectation that I expect my future self to live up to, and I hope she will perceive it as an easy one.