Day 29: Expectation vs reality

At book club the other night, my friend mentioned that she has known what she wanted her life to be like since her late teens, and so far it has all gone according to the plan. Her marriage (to the guy she fell for at age 15!), college, kids, etc. have all played out as she anticipated.

I replied that I have had the opposite of that. If I had written out a detailed life plan as a young adult, it would bear almost no resemblance to what my reality has been these past couple decades.

My college experience, career path, marriage, kids, the place I live...all those and more are quite different, in good ways and bad, from what I expected them to be.

What about you? When you graduated high school and headed into adult life, what did you think was ahead of you? How many of your predictions came true? Are there things that haven't happened yet that you are still working toward? Are there things that you wanted or expected that you are glad you didn't get?

You could also use this topic to tell a detailed story about a specific experience. When I agreed to a cross-country ride share to get myself home from college one summer, I had no idea what a ridiculous saga it would turn into. Late in the afternoon, hours later than we'd planned, I loaded my stuff into a suburban packed with several other people and their stuff and thought, "Well, this probably won't be the most fun ride ever, but at least tomorrow I'll be home!" Five minutes later the driver pulled into another apartment complex and informed us that we would be towing a junker car behind us (which was itself packed with junk) so that his brother could fix it up and sell it back in Illinois. So, we've got an old suburban, full of twenty year olds and their luggage, towing another car through the mountains, setting out just as night is about to fall. That journey was exactly as fun as you might expect it to be.