Always pack Pokémon.
Setting and breaking expectations
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I’ve written before about how I struggle with disappointment when even the smallest expectation I hold is broken. Whether the brand of ice cream I planned on buying is out of stock, my family and I visit a different café than the particular one I expected to peruse, or a phone call is unfortunately and surprisingly cut short—I sometimes feel disproportionately let down. I’m working on being a bit more flexible. I’ve also experienced immense joy in breaking expectations: this morning I walked the seven year old I au pair to school; we didn’t talk much on the way, he seemed a little distracted. After a few minutes and one zebra crossing we entered the gates of his school, when he took my hand and looked very earnestly at my face. His was pale. “Jeremy…” He said. “I forgot my Pokémon cards.” Side note: this reaction isn’t really about Pokémon cards or how cool they are, though they are cool. The move from kindergarten to school is a big one, and the Pokémon cards are a way to instantly connect with other kids and start conversations—maybe even friendships. Pokémon has been proving this service since I was in first grade. Far slower now and with great hesitation, we made our way into the school building. I dropped him off at his classroom, waved and left. Luckily his house is only a five minute walk away from school, so when I returned home to help get his younger brother and sister ready for their day at kindergarten, I found his Pokémon cards and brought them with me. In the ten minute break between first and second period, the door to his class swung open just a touch and through it he saw me, holding his Pokémon cards. Relief and excitement and another ten emotions lit up his face all at once. He believed he would have to be without his Pokémon cards for the whole day, but breaking that expectation was a welcomed change. I remember having the same experience once or twice during my school career. Maybe I had forgotten my lunch or sports clothes at home and my mom would show up in the middle of my day to drop them off at school. Every now and again my granny would pick me up from school and that, too, was a wonderful change to what I expected.
After dropping off the Pokémon cards, I walked to the grocery store. Shopping in Berlin is a different experience to shopping in Cape Town, but only partially. Once I could read the labels on the products, for example, it became quite clear that my selection of produce here and back home are practically identical, give or take a strange vegetable or dairy product. The biggest change is a social one: trying to figure out how to form the queue in a ‘German’ way, adapting to the fast paced check out at the tills or responding to questions about loyalty cards and collecting store points in my broken German. This morning, as I was piling the groceries for a household of seven onto the counter, a group of young people all blew through the shop behind me. Each only held an item or two and the queues quickly doubled in length. They chattered loudly as we young people do. I tensed. Once all my items had been scanned and payed for, I struggled to get my trolley (or shopping cart, if you prefer) out of the way while I packed my shopping bags. I had earphones in and a beanie on, I could only hear vague mumblings of the customers behind me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. It felt as though comments I could only half-understood and half-hear were being thrown my way. I felt that, somehow, I had violated an implied but unspoken grocery store rule and was behaving in an unspeakable way, deserving of cold stares and cruel facial expressions. Worse still, I am unable to identify just what I could have done to deserve being outcast, my German is only so good. I packed my bags as quickly as I could and left. My experience this morning was, largely, a pleasant one, though that has not always been the case. The hesitation I felt was a fear of being judged, of being deemed other. I don’t want to feel like an outsider, no one does. The fear of failing the expectations of others, the fear of making myself an outsider by breaking rules I didn’t know about, was an anxiety I struggled with all throughout high school and a fair bit of university.
I believe that I’ve said goodbye to the debilitating side of those concerns, the actual anxiety in the way that we mean it today. I still carry an echo of my fears with me, but it holds far less power over my life now. For instance, I can recognise that my description of my shopping trip and the reality I experienced are quite different (I also embellish my writing just a touch). No one was rude to me today, no one suggested that I was a nuisance or a fool, that I didn’t belong. But I did see the eyes of the cashier flicker ever so slightly when I struggled to respond to her simple questions about store cards and loyalty points. Perhaps she wondered why I struggled. When I struggled with anxiety I would have assumed (guessed, really) that my difficulty to understand her pushed her to form an opinion of me that I felt was untrue. My anxiety would kick into overdrive whenever I began guessing which of my actions would force an incorrect assumption on her end, or break an expectation she had of me. I did this with high school dances, with field trips, with my best friends. The vast web of my assumed expectations of others and the inferred expectations I had of myself was just as poisonous as it sounds. Had I left my Pokémon cards at home, I would’ve immediately begun imagining how I would recover from the imagined disappointment I had created in my friends because I had failed to live up to the expectations I imagined they had. I hope the kid I au pair doesn’t think the same way I did. I realise that much of life, especially youth, involves the desire and struggle to belong. Perhaps the struggle can be mitigated by disempowering the expectations of others and, in turn, leaving our own expectations behind.
Do remember to bring your Pokémon cards, though. If you enjoyed this journal, please send it to someone you love.
I truly loved this post. I see great things ahead for you, Jeremy.
Lovely honest sharing x