My super messed-up beliefs.

“We’d rather do what’s expected of us than give ourselves permission to be, do, and have what feels good and right awesome.” -Jen Sincero, author of You Are a Badass

BAM- my homegirl Jen lays it down again! (Full disclosure-she’s not my homegirl, as we’ve never met, but I’d like to think we’re pretty much best friends). 

How insane is it that we often CHOOSE to live small lives and stay inside the lines, even when it’s boring and suffocating and slowly killing us? Like what the hell is wrong with us?!

With this idea in mind, I’ve made a list of what I think is expected of me. When I look around me and take stock of the expectations of my friends, my family, society, my Instagram followers, the music industry, on and on…this is what I come up with.

The world expects me to…

• Work really, really hard in order to be deserving of my chosen career path. (You only get to call yourself a rockstar if you’re also poor and sad barely getting by and constantly bleeding for your art.)
• Shrink and get quieter (Society gets uncomfortable with women who dare speak their mind and raise their voice. Society gets really freaked out when anyone over like 25 does this.)
• Be about, oh, average levels of happy. Let my circumstances dictate my mood. (Anything else is weird and questionable.)
• Base my value on my looks (If you’re not pretty, no one will value what you have to say.)

Ew. Super messed up.

It’s trippy to examine what I believe the world expects of me, because in reality, I am aware that The World is not actually sitting around thinking about me, or placing expectations on me. So these are really just self-imposed limitations; concepts I’ve made up in my head that probably very often infiltrate my behaviors. It’s helpful to call these out for what they are so I can catch them as they surface and try to limit me.

What about you?

What do you think the world expects of you? How about your parents’ expectations? Your peers?

Leave a comment exposing some of these expectations that lurk in the background of your belief system, and we can get to work on calling out this BS together.

Love and freedom,

Ariel