Exceedingly Extravagant and Elaborately Enormous Expectations

I feel like that last post sounded a bit lost. 

Maybe I am lost. 

I never know. 

Sometimes it feels like there is just so much pressure. Pressure to be a good student, pressure to be a good friend, a good sister. Pressure to be a good Christian. Pressure to be a good artist. So much pressure to succeed. 

Sometimes that makes it scary. Like the expectations are so high that I'm afraid to even try, because what if I fail, then the image someone has in their mind of me is shattered, I'm reduced to splinters of Katy-ness on the floor of their imagination, nothing and no one again. 

I know these things are not true, but there is still that nagging fear in the back of the brain, that discreet terror of failure. It's like a monster sometimes, eating away at thoughts, nibbling on confidence, reducing one's own security to a chewed-up and less stable pile of somethingness that used to be something. But maybe was never really anything at all. 

 It's so complicated, so confusing. 

Reality is that people don't care that much. Those around aren't so closely observing that every minor (or major) failure is marked in a book, that each mess-up will count against you until suddenly you are a nothing. 

Reality is that we're all nothing, and we're all everything, and we're all complicated, and we're all way too focused on ourselves. 

We look in the mirror and find a million imperfections. Someone else looks straight at us and sees few of these faults. Blaring example are my many scars, which I see so clearly in the mirror everyday, and the reality that few people know they exist unless I have told them, or they see me in the right angle with the right lighting. 

We're always looking for the ways we fail, noticing our imperfections, analyzing our faults. So full of fear that everyone expects us to be perfect all the time, but they don't. 

Seemingly perfect people are scary. They're so unreal. They are hard to approach, there's a fear they will judge you because they are so much more perfect. But perfect people fail too, and they are the most scared of all. There's an expectation they feel pressure to constantly live up to, unrealistic expectations. In truth, everyone is human, and everyone fails from time to time, and no one is perfect. 

Being able to see those failures, face the fear of the pressure and expectation from others, and just admit to not looking, being, thinking, sounding, or feeling happy, perfect, beautiful, passionate, or good all the time is not only necessary, but utterly essential. 

There is a pressure to be perfect. The solution is not to try to live up to it, but to smash those high, unrealistic, and exceeding expectations and just live. 

Live, just live. And love, and laugh, and cry, and fail, and break things, and say sorry, and forgive, and be messy sometimes, and be random, be extreme, be passionate, be imperfect, be happy, be sad, be angry. Break things, fix things, sleep in, miss deadlines, be an over-achiever. Do everything, do nothing, be everything, be no one. Just live.