Nature Girl
The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps, of which I am a proud volunteer.

Hope isn't easily killed. I have tried to kill her many times, never really believing I'd succeeded, and still she refuses to die. That's a good thing, for the most part. But Hope has a dangerous twin sister Expectation.

In the life of every woman (and I expect also, every man) there comes a time when you look to the future and ask yourself what you want. At this point you separate what you were told you wanted and what you actually want. You also examine the horizon and make note of the difference between how you were told your life would be and how it is. For most of us I believe involves hearing a lot of "When you grow up and get married and have kids" and then looking around going "huh?" or "when?" and "Whaaa?"

For me I don't have a lot actual guides to reference when I think about ideas like "relationship" "happiness" and "forever" so I look to The Movies to be my guides. It occurs to me lately that several movies involve people reminiscing about happiness from their youth which is over. Happiness the character expected would continue to the end of the storyline and are now looking back on with fondness and regret.

Then there are the enormous multitude of movies that end when the couples get together and we presume they live "happily ever after." I have often commented that movies like this build false expectations - most of our stories end when a couple get together at the end of a film and we never see the complicated trials, or the work of maintaining a relationship.

But which is it? Should we expect that happiness will just come and that one day after some amusing pitfalls, some crying and a big comedic moment (Julia Roberts stealing a truck and proposing to her best friend) it will all fall into place and happiness will just arrive?

Or are we constantly wary, avoiding false expectations, eschewing disappointment and pain...and wrestling with hope?

There are things that I was told all my life - and I never believed them. I turned a cold eye to all romantic comedies which build dangerous expectations. The ones I don't admit to watching - and have done so only under duress. I told myself happiness can't be found in another person. Love should never be calculated in terms of what you "deserve" or think you deserve, and any time I ever heard someone say that I forced my interior monologue to shout "SHUT UP, SHUT UP" because people don't always get what they deserve. I think, rarely, they do. I repeated Eponine's lines in One Day More "Not for me, Not for me," until they became true for me and still I tried not to dream, tried to have no expectations. I tried to kill hope.

I did this because it was easier than maintaining that fragile faith. My faith in this area is almost gone. But then...

Where's the line between hoping and creating false expectations? What is tempting fate, setting yourself up for failure? And what is sitting on the bench, staying out of the game? When is it true that if you don't expect to find happiness you won't find it? What amount of hope, or expectation of happiness is reasonable?

I joined Peace Corps because I've always wanted to serve. But also for a bit of adventure, and maybe also to "find myself." And instead, maybe I'm finding something else. Something all those innocent - I believed naive grandmothers and well meaning Old Ladies said I would find, and I didn't believe them. Something I didn't know existed. Didn't think could exist. Still don't know if it does....
but maybe it does.
Maybe.
I hope.

No one but you.