Great Expectations

I wrote a book when I was nine about who I would be as an adult.  Reading it now is entertaining, to see how I perceived the world at nine.  At nineteen, I had dated several people and was getting married to a, what else?, RM.  We eloped to the temple, had kids, some of them die, it was very drama-filled.  When I was 17, I was getting ready to graduate high school, and I knew what I was going to do: UVSC for four years, graduate with a bachelors in behavioral science, and attend U of U to get my masters in clinical psychology or something like that.  Somewhere in there, I would meet and fall in love with (ha, I hoped!) a nice RM and he would "take me to the temple". Part of the reasons I had these expectations, was that I was taught to have these expectations.  Some of these expectations can be very helpful and very useful, and others only allow us to not bother thinking outside the box.  The reason I knew who I was going to marry was because it had all but been planned out for me.  I knew I was going to get a good education, because further education was the next step after high-school until you have a degree.

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I thought I would be now.  At 22, I was sure I'd be at U of U right now, working on my master's.  I'd be married and seeking a career in psychology.  Maybe I'd even have a child or two.  I'd be closeted as a homosexual woman, and probably still have no conscious clue why I felt such a disconnect from my female body.  I wonder if I ever would have been Relief Society president.

Things are very different from what I expected.  Actually, things are very different from what everyone expected.  And that is not always such a bad thing.