Meeting the Wrong Expectations

I'm from a very small town in Massachusetts where half of my graduating class either didn't go to college or went to community college, and almost everybody else went to a state school nearby home. I was one of probably ten kids in my graduating class to go to a private school, and even though Hamilton is only four hours from my house, it's one of the farthest distances kids from my hometown went. At my school, there was an expectation that no one would really amount to anything, and that was represented by apathy in both the students and the administration. My math teacher once handed a kid a McDonalds application in the middle of class and told him he might as well start filling it out because he was going to fail the class, and was on his way to dropping out. When you face expectations like that, it's so much easier to go along with them instead of working hard and trying to rise above our sad little town. My friends would just shrug when they failed a test or a class, because it's not like they expected to do any better.

I was raised with a very different set of expectations from most of my graduating class, which made going to my high school a strange experience. My family always expected me to go to college, and told me to work hard, get good grades, be involved in extracurriculars so that i could get a scholarship and move far away. It was an odd expectation, though, because college isn't a normal thing in my family. My mom went to community college late in life, my dad and his uncle both bounced around a few different state schools before graduating, and my cousin dropped out during his freshman year at Ohio State. So when my family expects me to go to a competitive private school like Hamilton and be successful, there's no precedent. I try to meet their expectations, but it's difficult, especially when i talk to my friends at Worcester and Fitchburg State, a few of whom are already considering moving back home for community college second semester. 

It's confusing to live with such contradictory expectations, since both are such strong pressures. My hometown really pulls people back in for some reason; in high school, we used to joke that no one ever really leaves. Guys who graduated years ago still go to every high school football game and try to sell us weed in the parking lot. My Facebook news feed is always filled with announcements from girls i graduated with, that they're pregnant or that they're engaged. I have no desire to move back home and live like that, but sometimes it seems a lot easier than trying to fulfill my parents' expectations. My conversations with them are full of manipulation, with them trying to make sure that i'm doing all my work and am joining lots of clubs, and me trying to make it seem like I'm fulfilling their expectations. When I fail a test here, or skip my 8:30 class, I think of my high school friends shrugging it off, and I wonder how they could be so casual. But nothing more was expected of them, and in a way, that's freeing.