Horizons Shrink To Fit Expectations

One of my ‘to dos’ on my Before 30 list is to write a book. For years now, I’ve had a nebulous idea for a novel and its central character floating around inside my head, but I’ve never started writing out any of my ideas. On Saturday night I sat in bed with an old school notebook and pen and finally began to turn the main character into a person, with a voice and a history. (Yeah, I’m not sure what happened to the twentysomething rock n roll lifestyle either.)

The title phrase was one that appeared about half way through my writing session, and whilst it perfectly describes the conundrum my character has found herself in, as soon as I wrote it I realised that is a problem I see every day, in myself and people around me.

Why has it taken me years to even start sketching out preliminary ideas about characters? Because my expectations, had, over the years been shrunk by the drip-drip effect of people saying that there was no point pursuing writing, as there was no way I’d ever be able to make a living out of it, or get published. It’s too hard, impossible, a fantasy. And I made the mistake of allowing other people to control my expectations, to fix my horizons.

Perhaps this haze of characters and ideas will never become a finished novel. Perhaps it will and it will never be published. Perhaps it will just be, well, rubbish. But at least I will have tried, overcome the most debilitating hurdle of thinking that you can’t do something and set my expectations of myself MYSELF.

I saw the same problem in most of my Chinese students. The real problem was not that they were incapable of decent spoken English, but that they had convinced themselves that it was too hard, that I would laugh at them, that it would excruciatingly embarrassing, that they JUST COULDN’T DO IT.

This wasn’t only the case with my high school students, where it took the entire first semester working on mainly overcoming the ‘I can’t do it’ block before we could really start working on their speaking itself, but even with the IELTS* classes I taught. These students had some of the best understanding of English I came across in Shijiazhuang, and were capable of formulating and expressing very sophisticated ideas in English, but stumbled because of their self-doubt and the ingrained belief that Chinese people are no good at oral English.

I could tell when a student, or even a class, had started to overcome their own externally imposed sense of limitations – suddenly there were smiles, an eagerness to talk to me outside of class, students volunteering to take part rather than having to be (almost literally in the first few weeks of class) dragged to their feet, a mischievousness and sense of fun in answers, even answers and opinions shouted out. To watch and to help this was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life, and has not only inspired me to overcome my own ‘I can’ts’ but made me aware that they exist in the first place.

What are your ‘I can’ts’, how have you overcome them, was it worth it?

*IELTS is an exam that non-English speakers need to take before being admitted to universities in English speaking countries. Most of my students were aiming for postgraduate study in Australia or the UK, where the requirement of gaining an average of 6.5 across writing, reading, speaking and listening requires skills beyond those developed at university, with speaking being the area that often dragged down the average mark.