I am the last of my family line and deals with expectations

Going up at least five generations, I am the end of A line of women whose names I am.

Some of these women, mainly Anna and Maria, Maria Graziana, Anna Marie and Anna Margaret in the tree, are only branches for me, settling in Brooklyn in the early 1800s in Ireland or more recently Italy. My mother and mother, Anna and Maria, are Women who have raised me And to whom I think when I sign a document or order a coffee.

However, they all cross my mind, these women confined to lives that would not have them comfortable or safe, living at times when They had no choice and focused on survival.

Their story has summed up the data from the census office and the manifests of ships. Since I was now 40 years old and It is unlikely to have childrenThis line disappears with me. I spent a lot of time thinking about the expectations that these women would have for me with all my life choices.

I am tired and I don’t want to jostle

Growing up, I heard my mother’s stories hide in the service truck when she I couldn’t afford a daycare to his phone work.

She believed that her hard work and her sacrifice would give me a life she did not. She led me to diction to take my accent to New York. We invented stories about me working in an office on the other side of the river in Manhattan and, one day, having my own house.

Each opportunity would be available to me.

She was right; They were and I seized them all. Whenever an opportunity arises, I jumped on it. I have Traveling on six continentsoccupied dreams and met celebrities, politicians and royalty. I have my own house, where I proudly show a black and white photo of my maternal family, a reminder of whom I must thank for everything.

But I have an overwhelming secret: I am tired in the depths of my bones, and I no longer want to shake up.

I would love the simple life that my ancestors had

Now I aspire to the cities of the Neapolitan castle and the Irish fields that my ancestors had. I browse the inexpensive Instagram home accounts, dreaming of fixers in abruze, eating scented tomatoes from the vine and chatting with neighbors in the communal gardens.

I would love a simple life. I would love to find a slower treadmill. I want to absorb art and literature, see the beauty of my own eyes and meet new people. I want to be able to name all the stars in the sky. But if I stop climbing and reaching the distinctions, do I drop them?

There are a lot of sciences behind the psychology of great expectations. It is very common to feel the deadly weight of family traditions that pick our paths in life. And when these parents died, there is the additional emotion to ask yourself if you have done everything you could with the time you have been given. We all want people we like to be proud of us.

An analysis of research in 2007 of Todd Rogers and Katy Milkman scientists puts this emotion in perspective with a daily choice. Think of the banal task of walking in the grocery store. You can aim to eat healthier, but you go just near the apples and decide to please yourself with a chocolate bar. Rogers and Milkman call this moment of consideration the myself against the manufactureWhat should I do with what I want to do, and you can find this psychological phenomenon far beyond the supermarket.

In the example of the chocolate bar, instant gratuity is the basic premise behind the myself. What will make you happy at the moment? This feeling is fighting in the self, which aims at the choices which, in our view, will have a more important future result. The should create a mental list of long -term advantages that will allow a better future. In psychology today, psychotherapist and author Nancy Colier goes furtherTake a correlation between wanting to be considered a conscientious and good person who is motivated to create a better future or to be considered as someone who takes what they want now. The problem here is that a list of “homework” can be subjective. These “should” could come from a cultural standard, such as thinking that we need a specific title to work or to think that we have to look at a way when our body is built in another way. This can even come from family traditions that have been overwhelmed for a long time to be beneficial for anyone.

I focus on what I want

Many moments of my happy and privileged life ask the question: “Am I enough?” Do I maximize every opportunity that was presented to me? Have I evolved into the highest scale of the career scale and become perfect in my social life? What do my ancestors think of what I did with the freedom that was attributed to me?

But recently, and with a lot of reading and research, I return this story to his head. More “should” which are tired and sick; I invite more to “want”. Is not part of the choice to accept what I really want to do?

Being my best me is not strictly adhering to what I think I should do to make others happy, but understand how to be the happiest in the time attributed to me. And I hope that is exactly what would make Anna and Maria is also proud.