Self-reflection meme

[azekeil]

Has your life gone the way you expected it to? What did you imagine your life would be like now when you were a child? When you were a teenager? Shortly after education? Somewhere between leaving education and now?

If it's different to what you expected, why?

What about your life in the future? Do you think it will actually turn out that way, or do you think it will be different? Why?

Comments

[zapruder.livejournal.com]

wow, this is hard to answer.

When I was a child I had no real concept of 'the future', probably because I was so ill and, to be blunt, no-one was expecting me to have much of one. I read a lot and wanted an exciting life, the sort I might read about. I couldn't imagine being 25 - 25 was very old. I would probably have expected I'd be rich and famous.

When I was a teenager I wanted the world on a plate. I had some remarkable opportunities in my late teens and did things I am pretty sure most people wouldn't do (like go and live in the USA with someone I'd just met the day before - I did that the weekend after my GCSE results came out). I expected things to fall into my lap. 25 was Past It and I never thought past the present.

When I left school I realised/was forced to realise that I was the mistress of my destiny and had to actually do something. I had a period of extreme depression/ill-health related to feeling like everything was very mundane and life would never be as exciting as it had been, like I had missed my chance. Of course dropping out of university and barely leaving the house made that something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I eventually forced myself out of the funk and took more a-levels and decided to start again at being a 'normal' person. The fear loomed large (I was 18/19 now), that at 25 I would be doing something unfulfilling and unremarkable, or lying in bed all day feeling sorry for myself.

Then I got pregnant, which was something I had always been told would never be achieved without fertility treatment (following childhood chemotherapy). Suddenly there was a motivating factor again, though I think I had a very unrealistic concept of what single-parenthood entailed. I was desperate to get qualificiations and imagined my life at 25 as being a sort of downtrodden suburban mundanity with me working as a primary school teacher part-time or something. I was desperate not to be alone.

So my present is not really how I imagined I'd end up! In many ways it feels like beyond the best case scenario. I was always so convinced I was unlovable, and that I'd mess everything up. I mess plenty up but things have turned out so, so much better than I thought they would. Mundanity doesn't feel like a bad thing anymore; and anyway, it's what you make of it.

My future is sort of hazy. I want to live abroad, and/or I want to do a PGCE and teach post-16 (ultimately I'd like to teach mature students, access courses, that sort of thing). I still want/expect something remarkable to happen, to fall out of the sky and change my life - but increasingly I think that it's already happened :)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Fascinating.

I can really relate to how you must have felt at each stage of your life.

I find it very weird to look back at how I thought in the past and realise I was wrong. Trouble is, I can't think of anything where I was wrong enough in a significant way, which is distressing. I must have them, just can't think of them right now. More thought needed.

Anyway, it's of interest to me now because I want to do the impossible: find some way to get through to a teenager that they really won't know their own mind; we as adults (hah!) are still struggling to figure out how to live our lives, and still get it wrong now (do we?)

More thoughts and perhaps a conclusion coming soon in a post near you.