Expectations vs. Reality

 

One of my stumbling blocks as a writer/partner/friend/human-on-this-planet is my inability to handle a situation when my expectations don’t match my reality. You know in (500) Days of Summer when Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character) fantasizes about certain situations only to be punched in the gut by reality? Yeah, that’s me. On the daily. I’m constantly creating these expected scenarios in my brain. And, frankly, it’s exhausting. It’s also frequently impossible for people/situations/myself to ever fully meet these expectations.

I think this has held me way back in my writing life. (Don’t get me started on my dating life. Oy.) Because I have these unrealistic expectations for what I should be writing like and how people should be responding to my writing. And then– when those expectations collapse around me– I get discouraged and quit. I think this video by Ira Glass describes the phenomenon well.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

My favorite line from the video:

[Your] taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.

So, I’ll keep writing. Even though I know what I am writing isn’t there yet. Even though, in order to get there, I have to accept reality and be patient with myself.

An introduction.

 

Hello and welcome to the writing blog and portfolio website of Emily Abigail Krugh (pronounced ‘crew’).  Here are some things you should probably know about me in order to understand my writing perspective a bit better.

1. I’m 29 years old and live in a tiny white house with blue trim near downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. My home was built in 1890 and is the perfect size for me, my pup Harper, and my cat Basil. It has a little fenced-in backyard which (much to my chagrin) Harper hates. I’m not sure if it’s the grass or the fact that she’s just a city pup. Either way, I can often be heard coaxing her into the yard in the early morning and begging her to ‘man up and go to the potty’.
2. I’m a serial monogamous. This has resulted in a lot of …intriguing…dating ventures. I often write about those ventures. Some might even want to label me boy-crazy. I would neither confirm nor deny this statement. However, I have been called the T. Swift of fiction writing. I’ll let you chew on that for a minute.
3. My background and current day job is in the education realm. I taught high school English for three years at a local charter school. That was eye-opening. Currently, I’m an educational advisor at a local university. I enjoy what I do.
4. I’m also a graduate student working toward my masters in English. I’d love to teach at the college level some day.
5. I’ve never been published. I hope to do that someday. I’ve actually hardly completed any pieces of writing aside from a few short stories and non-fiction pieces. I’m hoping that this website will push me to do so.
6. Other things I enjoy (in no particular order): scarf weather, driving in the country with the windows down, the month of October, coffee shop-book store combos, Instagram, my handful of truly good friends.

That sums it up. Just about. Come back and visit me every so often. I’m just getting started.