Whether it’s purposeful or not, the people around us set expectations for us every single day. From the moment of your birth, your family and culture have pre-determined a grocery list of expectations for your life set with a timeline for you to meet them.
While some expectations are biological, such as walking and talking, cultural expectations determine how you’re supposed to dress, speak, and conduct yourself throughout your life.
Some expectations serve a purpose in ensuring our ability to thrive as independent adults in the future. Other expectations are arbitrary “rules” that don’t serve any real purpose other than expressing what society has deemed “normal.”
Obviously, every single person can’t fit into these expectations, for whatever reason. When you don’t meet them, it comes with judgment, assumptions, and more expectations.
When you spend your entire life trying to check off the items on your assigned “grocery list,” you aren’t living for yourself. You may genuinely believe that once you check off one more thing, you’ll be happy, but it’s not always true.
The hard truth is, if you’re living your life based on what other people told you it should be, you will never be happy.
So many of the LGBTQ+ adults that we have worked with expressed the crushing weight of other people’s expectations. They felt they had to be married by 25 with a successful career by 30. They needed a big house in the suburbs to raise their children, and a nice car to take them to soccer practice. They had to look perfect on the outside, even if they were miserable and struggling on the inside.
Most of the time, they were so busy trying to check things off of the list that they failed to stop and ask themselves, “Is this what I really want?”
Take a moment to ask yourself that question right now.
Is your life, as it is at this moment, what you really want?
If the answer is, “no,” then it’s time to do what our students have done: release other people’s expectations in favor of a life that is yours and yours alone. We know that may sound scary, but that’s why we do what we do.
Our goal as LGBTQ+ life coaches is to support you on your journey toward the life and relationships of your dreams, and give you all of the tools you need to create that for yourself. If you’re ready to change your life now, we’re ready to help you do it.
With Love,
Dani & Keely
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