The Paper Trail

I can’t believe that after all those years of thinking it would never come, my first week of senior year is now officially over. Even more insane is that during the back-to-school craziness, I managed to post on here three times. Three times!

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from senior year. I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t revise my hopes completely – I’ve only gotten five days into the school year. But still, I think I was hoping for it to be a magical week, where I somehow gained the confidence I never had and reconnected with all the friends I missed over the summer.

But it wasn’t like that. Actually, I felt really out of place this whole week. I think it was because all those familiar faces were gone – all those people older than me didn’t return. I’m the oldest in the school now, which really just makes the whole school seem like a sea of people I don’t know. All the underclassmen still have memories to make. But I only have one year left to make those memories – that’s a lot less time than I realized walking in.

I know. What a super melodramatic way of talking about the first week back. Everyone else is optimistic about seeing their friends and getting closer to graduation. And I am glad I got to see people I haven’t spoken to in a long time. And I am excited to finish my high school career. But it all feels so surreal. How is it possible that I’m a senior?!

Okay, okay, okay. I’ll stop.

This week I’m going to cover how to bounce back from failed expectations. What I mean by this is when dreams don’t add up to reality. When hopes don’t compare to what actually happened. And I think we’ll find that reality is actually a really good place to be at.

Change your perspective

So my first week back wasn’t the greatest. But it didn’t suck either.

Actually, it was really fun to be in different classes – to experience a high school senior’s schedule. But my expectations of becoming a senior paled in comparison to what actually happened. I don’t really know what I thought would happen when I walked into that school as a senior… but it didn’t happen.

I think that in every situation, we like to have an ideal circumstance. We’d like to click with the manager at a job interview. We’d like to have the best vacation, chalk full of amazing, picture perfect memories. We’d like to have everything happen the way we want it to happen. But unfortunately, reality doesn’t want to conform to what we want to happen. And we need to work on accepting that.

Sometimes real life doesn’t live up to our expectations. But there is always the possibility that things will go much better than we hoped for. And maybe even in the drab moments, there are some shining lights of unexpected goodness. Instead of focusing on how wrong or different things went, we should start focusing more on what went well.

Maybe that job interview didn’t work out. Buuuuuut, maybe it was your first job interview, making it something to celebrate (… yes, this was my perspective a few weeks ago at my first job interview). Maybe that vacation wasn’t picture perfect, but there had to be a handful of unexpected surprises that made things better, right? Reality is different than our hopes and dreams. But that doesn’t automatically make it a bad different.

Find the Big Picture

So, changing perspectives to try to find the silver lining is nice. But constantly comparing reality to expectations in order to find that silver lining isn’t exactly healthy. Why? Because it downplays the significance of real life.

Listen, it may not seem like it at points, but reality is generally a good place. Constantly comparing it to the made up, unrealistic expectations of your mind belittles and distorts the very real goodness all around you. Things might not be perfect, but they definitely aren’t as bad as your perspective makes them seem.

Let’s break this down a little. My first week of senior year didn’t live up to my expectations. Maybe I thought things would just click and then everything would just work out exactly perfectly so that I could glide through my senior year without any hiccups. But that doesn’t mean it was all bad. It’s helpful to find silver linings in the moment just to get you through the situation, but looking back, you must look at the big picture.

Big picture: I made it to my senior year. I survived twelve long years of schooling, starting at just five years old in kindergarten. After all those first days of school, I finally made it to my last first day of school. My last first week of school. I’ve got really amazing teachers this year and a schedule that is exactly what I wanted. After this year, I get to go to college and study what I want to learn and use for the rest of my life.

There are little silver linings in every day. But each day is just a piece of a bigger painting. Focus on that picture. That’s your reality, and it’s a lot prettier than you think it is, even if it seems like every expectation you have ends up not being fullfilled.

Continue to Dream Anyways

This sounds counter-intuitive, but I think perpetually staying negative is counter-intuitive. A pessimist is never disappointed. An optimist regularly gets their hopes and dreams destroyed by reality. I think the stronger of the two is the optimist, because it is those people who continue to live in the same exact positive way anyways. It’s difficult to do beneficial things that have been proven to fail occasionally – or on a daily basis. The people who see the value in doing hard things are more likely to get back up, over and over and over.

Pessimism is super easy. As long as you don’t get your hopes up about anything at all, you’ll stay successfully disconnected from the world around you and will never get hurt by anything. Effectively, pessimists are wrapping themselves in protective emotional bubble wrap so that nothing could ever go wrong for them.

But is that how life is supposed to be lived?

Listen, I’m no optimist. I’m just as pessimistic as everyone else. That’s because I never want to get hurt by anything. I’ve tried to be optimistic for a day, and that is hard work. Imagine living like that every day – seeing the good in everything, wanting the best for everyone, hoping that great things will come their way, believing that great things will come their way. Sounds terrible, right?

Oh, wait.

No. Actually it doesn’t sound awful. It sounds nice. A happy way to navigate such a pessimistic world. But it’s difficult, isn’t it? We all know it’s easier to be negative because we all know what it’s like to have our expectations not live up to reality. But isn’t a known fact that you have to work hard for good things?

Changing your perspective is hard. Those silver linings aren’t always so obvious. It’s even harder to find the big picture when the here and now don’t live up to what you imagined it’d be like. But choosing to dream anyways, despite everyday life being difficult – that’s the biggest challenge of all.

But don’t you think it’s worth it? I think it makes life exciting. What’s life without a dash of hope – even if that hope is a tad unrealistic?

So what’s my reality check? Well… I finished my last first week of high school. And it wasn’t magical or world changing. But I got to laugh with a few friends, park in my reserved parking spot, return to the band room for one final year of music. And it did make me realize how close I am to starting a new era of my life. Maybe my reality fell short of my expectations, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to dream about what comes next.