I am a terrible manager of expectations. Always have been. And it started when I was I was a kid. We would spend some of our summers with our surrogate grandma, who lived in a one bedroom house (I've literally NEVER seen a smaller home than hers) but always had big dreams. Most days she didn't even get out of bed because she was sick or just didn't want to get up (I guess). But she would always talk about big things and how we were all going to do them together. We're gonna go to Disneyland or we were gonna spend the day at a water park. They weren't all huge dreams. The problem is none of them ever came true. And my mom knew they wouldn't and tried to talk the sibs and I down from our excited ledge. But it never worked with me, I always bought into the same dreams. Before that, it was my father who lured me in with talk of actually being a father to me. Somehow my sister knew it would never happen, my mom never really wanted it to happen (because she also knew it wouldn't), and my brother was too young to care. But I was all in from the moment he mentioned it. In the beginning, he would call and talk to all of us (on the low because we lived with grandma and she loathed the man) and things went well. Then the calls became more infrequent but I still wanted to believe he was just busy and would call when he could. Then the calls stopped. And all my expectations were flung by the wayside. Even now I can get myself worked up over something very quickly.
So I guess it's not a surprise that I'm feeling the same way I did when I was kid. Like I got myself all worked up and excited and then hit the ground when it didn't work out. Only this time I'm so mad at myself because I knew better than to get excited. Birthdays are like any other day of the year for me (well, mine is anyway). Doing one or two things to celebrate is usually all I do, aside from having cake. But this year I was home and it's a fairly significant week and a half in that it's the anniversaries of both accidents. And not just any year, but a decade since both of those happened. I thought that would hold some kind of significance. But it doesn't I guess. Or not to anyone but me anyway. I don't know. Tonight just made me feel very unloved. No one likes feeling that way obviously but it's worse when it's en masse. It's like...what was the point of coming out of everything I did a decade ago? Had I lived or died, everything would've been as it was tonight. I don't know...I guess the lesson is just to not have expectations. Or at least not high ones. There's no point. I started the day with high expectations and feeling awesome and then...GONE. So fuck it.
