Great Expectations: Excellence as Expected

By Delaney Couri

When I was graduating high school, my family threw me a graduation party to celebrate my accomplishments. Held in the mess hall area of my church, people who had known me most of my life stopped by to eat cupcakes, drop off presents, and congratulate me on my impending graduation and move to college. One way that friends and family were encouraged to engage with me during the party was by leaving me notes in a journal. Framed as part congratulatory, part advice giving, my mom bought a notebook and left it on a table as a guest book for attendants to sign.

The well wishes in the book ranged from single sentence platitudes left by acquaintances to meandering paragraphs left by close friends and former teachers. Thematically, many of the messages carried a similar perspective that could be summed up in just one short sentence: “You’re going to do such great things!”

This sentence was written multiple times in a few different ways, always squished between notes on how wonderful I had been growing up and how hopeful my future seemed. It felt as if everyone who came to celebrate my high school accomplishments was looking at my life as a series of accomplishments.

My initial acceptance into the gifted and talented program in elementary school alongside my ACT score from 7th grade and status as a National Merit Scholar positioned me as not just someone who exceeds expectations, but someone whose very expectations had begun to be marked only by success. In other words, my bright future where I would do “such great things!” was not encouragement, but expectation. An insidious whisper that said anything less than the best was below the standards that I had set for myself.

Unfortunately, I never had any say in setting those standards. I was a child who excelled in standardized tests, not an adult striving for success. I didn’t succeed because I was especially driven or understood the stakes, I was just a kid who was asked to do logic puzzles. Either way, as a result of my aptitude for things like logic puzzles, I became seen as more of an adult with an agenda and a horde of expectations surrounding me.

This legacy of greatness, or at least the expectation thereof, has followed me into adulthood by making me an anxious perfectionist. The literature on children who were raised as gifted and talented aligns with my experience as those of us who were seen as exceptional when we were little have now aged up into the cold adult world where all of the things we were told mattered are less important than ever. While I feel like I have continued to achieve, the pressure sometimes becomes so great that any sort of failure is unacceptable. I expect to get every job, every fellowship, every opportunity because I always did -- and was always told that I would! While this sounds both egotistical and entitled, it is a direct result of my socialization as a “smart kid.” After all, didn’t everyone who signed my high school graduation journal say I would do “great things?”

Everyone who has ever told me I will do great things was only being encouraging, but peeling back years of pressure to perform has often left me with an ugly bottom layer of shame, disappointment, and guilt. Especially now as I enter a competitive and uncaring job market, the cracks in my manicured perfection are starting to show and I don’t always have the skills to deal with it. I am grateful for the support I have received from friends and family as I learn to recognize that when they say they think I will “do great things,” they also assure me that just being me is enough. When I shared my worries and stress with a close friend, she looked at me and told me that I was loved exactly as I was and that with her, I would never have to earn that love. This affirmation from my parents, my friends, and even my advisor is the only way I have begun to see my own self worth and personhood as separate from my accomplishments.

At the end of the day, I am still the little kid who did well on the ACT, graduated as a National Merit Scholar, and is a doctoral candidate. I am high achieving. But I am also silly, soft, kind, thoughtful, creative, easily distracted, and quirky.

And the only expectation I am trying to reach anymore is being beautifully, wonderfully, and messily, myself.