Environment vs. Expectations

    Sophie Cucco

    Are we products of our environment or products of our expectations? I have a strong stance that we are products of our expectations.  There are people that are handed everything in life and they turn out rotten, while others can come from nothing and create a beautiful and fruitful life for themselves. We can be dealt bad cards, but I believe our paths are determined by something so much deeper than the environment we start out in. The people that influence us, teach us, and love us. The opinions we form of ourselves and lives that we choose to chase are what impacts us the most.

While reading about Wes Moore and the other Wes Moore, I've thought a lot about my own experiences and how they have shaped me. Through this, I have come to recognize that our expectations for ourselves matter more than anything else. For example, I go to a very prestigious ballet school in New York City. We have students from across the entire planet, i'm talking Brazil, Japan, Ukraine, and South Africa, just to name a few. We all come from extremely different backgrounds. We all have different families, we're all different ages, different genders, different people, yet we all ended up in the same place. So what's the common denominator? We all have the same passion and drive and dream. This is what we've worked our entire lives for, this was what we've expected for ourselves.  I was fortunate enough to grow up with parents who supported all of my dreams. My parents both went to college, as did their parents before them. My great grandmother went to Michigan State University at a time when many women weren't. I always knew that I was going to go to school and get a degree, that was never even a question for me. When I told my family at 16 that I wanted to move to New York City to train, that expectation remained. Even if it wasn't in the traditional academic path, I was going to succeed at this too. A career in the arts can often be seen as unconventional, and a lot of my peers don't have the same backing that I do. A friend of mine isn't even in contact with his family anymore. The expectation of him was to follow his families path, marry a woman, work in a corporate office, and that's that. He supports himself, he found his own family, he rejected the expectations placed upon him, to create the life that he wanted. Beyond just the expectations that are placed upon us, our own individual desires play a factor into the people we become as well.

There are much more minor details to the ways in which expectations mold us as people. Other than the big ones, like what career we choose or where we end up in life, what about how they shape our personality? We all learn in school how to be kind, how to share, how to communicate, but it doesn't stick for everyone. Why? This is where I believe that environment could come into play in terms of our development. Take an only child versus someone with siblings for example. There is a stereotype that single children tend to be more self-centered or selfish people, because they weren't raised in an environment where they have ever had to compromise with their brother or split time with their parents. At the same time, maybe it's because they weren't expected to learn those things. That is where I struggle with this question, because I believe that our expectations can contribute very heavily to our environment.

 So maybe it is both. I think that people can either choose to defy expectations of them and escape their environment, or they can lean into the precedent set before them. Either way, the answer lies within the person. We get to choose to take autonomy over our own lives.