What Do You Expect?

I sometimes get frustrated by the disparity between who I am and what is expected of me. Sometimes I feel that I cannot live up to expectations, leaving me a failure. Sometimes I tell Plato to go perform actions unsuitable for polite company, because the main difference between Me and Ideal Me is that I exist and anyone who wants anyone else will just have to deal. And then I remind myself that that isn't quite fair, what's so great about existing that makes Me more important than Ideal Me? And what makes you so sure that Me exists? How do you know that Me isn't just some distorted reflection of all the Ideal Mes manifested in this world of Forms?

There some interesting ideas that crop up in our culture (and possibly others, I don't know). I think that our culture as Americans is very self-centered. So much of our culture emphasizes being yourself. Finding yourself. Being true to yourself. I think of these ideas as very much for white people. It's not always about you or what you want. Sometimes it's about what you must do because that is what is expected of you. 

The idea of a Me is somewhat misleading, maybe even completely wrong. I think of it like an electron. You cannot "find" Me. You cannot pin down Me like a butterfly. Me is not a classical object. Me does not have a position or momentum except as a probability field. You cannot observe Me without changing Me. How can you be true to such a finicky thing? Can Me be discovered or must Me be invented? Does Me even exist? Or is there only the person living your life?

I sometimes feel expectations bearing down on me with the weight on inevitable disappointment. Like it's only a matter of time before I'm revealed as a fraud who never had it in them to live up to those expectations, or even worse, who could have lived up to them but simply didn't. 

To relieve the weight, I tell myself that I owe nothing to anyone. That all I really need to do is survive. I do not need greatness. I do not need happiness. I do not need money. I do not need friends. All I need to do is be alive. All I need to do is be sustainable. All I need to do is be alive until I'm dead. 

And then I become afraid that I can't even do that. I didn't say that my fears were rational. This leads me to a new life goal: Do not become a crack whore. I actually think that I can accomplish goal fairly easily as long as I never do crack. As long as I never do crack, no matter how bad life gets, at least I won't be a crack whore. And that's comforting, I don't really know why. Maybe it's just nice to have a lower bound on my life.

Maybe that is what I will tell My Future Kids: as long as you never sell your body in exchange for crack or leave your life to "find" yourself, I will not be disappointed.