⚡Day 3. Unexpected leaps.
You know what they say about assuming …
A great flash essay often comes to life through some element of surprise. This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us find unlikely details and fresh new ways of seeing our world. Monday focused on getting outside ourselves and Tuesday was all about weird discoveries.
Today, we’re leaning into tension and exploring the fertile space between expectation and reality. Expectations—our own or others’—can create one story or way of seeing the world, though not always one that reflects our actual lived experiences or emotions. The collision of the two can be a great source of discomfort, but also of potential, as in “Banana-Strawberry Smoothie” by Emily Chao and “Boot Cut” by Zachary Ostraff.
PROMPT #3
Tell a story about a time when something didn’t feel the way you thought it would/should.
What event or events were at the center of this experience, and what kinds of feelings were involved? How has your interpretation of the event(s) and feeling(s) changed since that time? Write for 15-20 minutes
Share: A sentence or paragraph where expectation and reality collide.
With dread I stopped hair color treatments and discovered I was not “going gray” in the monotone way suggested by that phrase: I was growing gloriously silver, brilliantly white, sporting an Emmy Lou Harris-like abundance of color!
When I decided to have my DNA analyzed by Ancestry.com, I was hoping to learn about my maternal great-grandfather. According to our family lore, he had been “adopted” (though, not legally) by a childless couple in the mid-1800s and was raised as their son. His last name was different from theirs, however. I wanted to see if I could learn anything about his birth parents. What I learned from the DNA analysis, surprisingly, had more to do with my father’s side of the family.
When I received the Ancestry report and opened the section on DNA matches, I saw that the first person listed had a name I didn’t recognize and that Ancestry had determined that this person was my half-sister. Half-sister? That couldn’t be right. I was an only child. I had never had any siblings. Right? At first, I dismissed this revelation as a mistake. But then I looked deeper into the match, and I saw that this woman and I were related through my father’s side of the family. The information suggested that she and I had the same father. Uh oh.