The dangers of high expectations...

Today, I turned 18 and now I'm pessimistic about optimism. 

I have been looking forward to this day for a very long time, as soon as I turned 16 to be precise. So naturally I had placed this age, this big one eight as they say on a pedestal. I envisioned it to be epic, I also imagined that I would feel different too; Instead what I actually felt was a big disappointment, I also felt very unfulfilled. As soon as I woke up, I reflected on my 18 years of existence and realised that that's all I really did. I just existed. So far I have failed to actually live and that scared me a bit so I swiftly pushed that thought away and vowed to myself to enjoy the day.

Enjoying the day however, proved to be far more difficult than I had anticipated. 

There was this awkward period where I sat in the canteen alone, which is daunting enough on a normal day but on my birthday it was such a dreadful feeling and to make matters worse, I had a gift bag so people knew it was my birthday. I wanted to shrink into a microscopic size so that I would be invisible to the naked eye but unfortunately turning 18 didn't come with magical powers. To avoid making eye contact with anyone, I did what anyone in my situation would do: pretend to be texting. Luckily a friend of mine turned up and I didn't feel so abandoned.

The misery continued at home, my mother tried so hard to be nice to me but she just couldn't help herself, it was so apparent  how difficult it was for her to make this one day out of 365 feel special for me and in the end I think she just gave up trying. 

To be honest today wasn't especially bad, it was just like any other day which would have been fine if this was just any other day. You see to every one else it was but to me, it is my anniversary of life and I had high expectations for it and that was where I went wrong.