Maybe you feel like you're a disappointment to your family, whether or not anyone told you that you were. You're not alone. It can be depressing especially near Thanksgiving when everyone is talking about all of their great achievements and their fantastic jobs. Maybe you're embarrassed because you're a little overweight, or you don't have a 4.0, or because you didn't go to college, or you didn't go to college for what your parents wanted you to go for. Half of the battle to stop feeling like you've disappointed your family is to be more confident, to not feel bad about yourself or what you do, but nowadays, 'being more confident' seems to be the answer to everything, and it's not always that easy. I get it. So while you're working on that, here are some reasons that being the 'disappointment,' or the black sheep of your family isn't a bad thing.
1. You grew a tough skin.
Yeah! Look at you! Stuff just rolls off of you now, doesn't it? When you're at Walmart in your pajamas at 4 a.m. and the cashier makes a snide comment about a party, you're all ready to combat it with something flippant because you're used to it. At Thanksgiving dinner when relatives say all the rude stuff that they are required to say because they are relatives, it rolls right off of you, and maybe your Type A cousin is going to cry about it later that night. Fail a test? No biggie, you can pick yourself back up. You're stronger for it, be proud!
2. Your expectations are lower, your rewards are greater.
When you feel like the people around you are disappointed, you expect them to be rude. That's just the way family gatherings are, that's just the way your parents are. They pick and poke and make fun and maybe call you names but that's okay because you were expecting it, so it doesn't bug you as much, but when they say something nice about you, it's gonna be like 10 times better because you didn't expect anything nice to be said to you at all.
3. On the flip side, their expectations are lower.
You've got a judgy family, so what? That just means that they don't expect you to do really well. Yeah, that might sting, but look at it this way — when you get a D on your Calculus test, they're not going to be more disappointed in you because that's what they thought you'd get, so you don't get scolded or put down for it, like your straight A sister might be. And when you do get an A or B, it's great, they're so impressed because they were expecting something lower. No matter what, it's a lot harder to let them down.
4. You have a lot more downtime.
This might seem blindingly obvious, but seriously, when you're not busy trying to please your parents or get involved in every single extracurricular that your school offers, you have so much more time to have fun. Instead of competing in Scholar Bowl (which no one cares that much about anyway), you can be at home eating ice cream and playing with your cats, which is definitely more fun. You don't have to worry about conforming to all those rigorous activities to put you on top, you can just be yourself.
5. You've got a competitive edge.
Not everyone does this, so don't quote me, but I've seen it on multiple occasions. When you're a person who's at the bottom of the heap, you probably don't like it much and have consciously invested time into not being at the bottom of the heap anymore. For those type A people that your parents are proud of, they've probably had almost everything handed to them. Test retakes? Done. New car? Done. Nice job? Done. They probably haven't had to work for a lot of what people are proud of them for, so if they ever have to work for something, they'll be completely unprepared. You? Everything that you have, you've had to work so hard to get, and everything you've done wrong, you've never heard the end of. When it's impossible to get accolades for the things you do, you probably try harder to get better and rise to the top, which makes you automatically more competitive, and all the work that you put in to get there makes you so much more prepared for everything that can get thrown your way.
