Expectation is its own assault. A quiet demand nailed into you until you give way, until you surrender to a story that was never yours. They call it love, or concern, or accountability. But it is something else. A theft. A trespass. The arrogance of believing they have the right to define you.
People expect things. They expect you to submit to the version of yourself they have already written in their heads. They expect compliance. Agreement. Gratitude.
They do not know you. Not really. They mistake glimpses for truths. A sentence for a life. A silence for consent.
And yet they judge. They hold you to standards they never name, ones you never agreed to. Entitlement disguised as principle. Projection masquerading as virtue.
Psychologists have long described this as the fundamental attribution error. The tendency to explain someone else’s behavior as character rather than circumstance. A single action becomes the whole of you. A choice. A gesture. A pause in speech. Evidence of who you are, even when it is nothing of the kind.
History shows this is not new. Societies have always punished those who refused the assigned role, women most of all. The witch hunts. The asylums. The whispered accusations of hysteria. To deviate was to be condemned.
The arrogance of it. To claim knowledge of another life. To insist your lens is the only one.
It is not about you. It never was. It is about what they need reflected back, what they cannot face alone. Their fear. Their comfort. Their insistence on a world arranged to suit them. You are conscripted into their story, cast into roles you did not choose. A mirror for their desires. A surface for their disappointments. They are not looking at you. They are looking through you.
It is an obscene expectation. And it is everywhere.
The demand is written into sacred language.
Job asked for vindication. Stripped of everything. Accused by those closest to him. He waited for God to answer. What he received was silence first, then something else. Not comfort. Not explanation. Only the demand to keep standing inside the storm.
This is how cruelty disguises itself. Not in open attack but in expectation. In the pressure to endure what should undo you. In the insistence that restraint is strength, that survival without undoing is proof of worth. They do not ask how you breathe inside the storm. They ask only that you remain standing in it. Unbroken. On display. Their demand is not that you heal. It is that you reassure them. That suffering can be managed. That ruin can be orderly. That fortitude can be worn like a badge.
I will not be the vessel for what they cannot hold. The roles they invent. The demands they never name. I make myself small so they can feel vast. I carry what they refuse to touch. I break so they can remain whole. I bleed so they can stay clean. I drown so they can keep breathing.
And beneath the discipline are the words I cannot speak. I refuse to be remade in your image. I will never smile so you can believe you are right. I will not sit quietly while you measure my silence. I refuse to carry the shame you leave behind. I will never forgive just to make you comfortable. I refuse to pretend this is strength. My devastation will not be turned into a lesson. This loss will not be sanctified. Existence is not a performance for your eyes. I refuse to make this look easy. I will never be grateful for endurance. I will never call this growth. What happened will not be erased. The cost will not be diminished. You do not decide what it meant. You do not decide who I am. Cruelty will never be mistaken for kindness. The storm carries no refuge. I refuse the story you wrote for me. I refuse to vanish inside your comfort.
Deliverance does not arrive gently. It comes after the breaking. After the unraveling. After the obliteration of what was never meant to last. It comes in the wreckage, when the structure is stripped of its illusion, when what held together no longer holds. In that exposure. In the failure of what cannot be restored. There is the chance for something real to appear.
I once believed there would be room to become myself. That time would open into space. That age would loosen the grip of what was expected. Instead, there is always a voice waiting. A reminder of how I should perform. How I should move, how I should change. Freedom was never freedom at all. It was another measure. Another rule. Another story written by someone else.
As an adolescent I imagined autonomy would come with age, that there would be a point at which the self could expand without constant correction. What I discovered instead was classification. School operated less as education than as a system of sorting. Each person filed into categories. Social. Behavioral. Aesthetic. You were expected to align with one. To make yourself legible through conformity.
The process was diagnostic in its precision. The way you spoke. The clothes you wore. The desk you chose. All treated as data points confirming placement. To decline participation was to risk exclusion. To belong was to accept misidentification.
I did not want the label. Not the reduction of a whole to a single word. Even then I recognized that what they called belonging was in fact erasure, that the structures of order were designed not to reveal the self but to contain it. I resisted without knowing the word for it. I only knew I would not fit.
Grief carries its own system of order. The same sorting. The same labels. The categories of how loss should appear. How mourning should sound. Too much and you are spectacle. Too little and you are suspect. Every gesture interpreted, every pause assigned meaning. They name your brokenness for you, and in the naming, they make it disappear.
What follows is not hope. Hope implies a future that waits with open hands. A promise of restoration. What I carry is different. It is smaller. Rougher. Unadorned. A will to continue. Nothing more. The body persists. Automatic. Indifferent. Existence stripped of meaning. Stripped of mercy. There is no promise in it, no vision of what comes next. Only continuation. Only the refusal to end.
There is no lesson here. This is what is left.