Others' expectations of you are their expectations. You can try your whole life to fill others' expectations and not fill them. You have tried. That is what you have been doing. You have made others' expectations yours, as though you were a slave to others' wishes and were obliged to obey.
You have not always been conscious of this. You thought your thoughts were your own, but many or most of your thoughts have been adopted. Better to adopt Mine.
When you were a child, you had to do what someone told you to do. You were penniless and dependent for everything.
You are not a child now, and you are dependent upon no man, not even your employer. You are hired, no more no less. You are not his possession.
I do not say to go against someone's wishes. I say to find your own.
You have your inner map. One thing feels right with you, and another does not.
No man in the kingdom of Earth is sovereign over another. It is demeaning to believe that.
If you are a housecleaner, of course, you want to clean someone's house according to their plan, but what you have to know is that it is you who chooses to follow their ideas. You are not their subject.
If you are a wife, and if your husband likes his toast dark or light, you accommodate. You are not giving up anything to please another in ways that are theirs to be pleased. But your life is your own. You are not your husband's subject. Nor is he yours.
He is not your horse to drive. Nor are you his.
Your children are not yours to abjure. They are not your slaves or your figurines. They are My beings of light, entrusted to you to nurture and delight. They are not your sovereigns either.
And life is not your ruler either. Life may coax you, teach you, even batter you, but it is not the ruler of you. You are the ruler of you.
You do not give up your heart to another. Give your heart, but do not give it up. Do not turn it over to another to do with as he wills. It is your heart, not someone else's. It belongs to you and to Me, and not to another.
Others' expectations of you are not theirs by divine right. They have no right to ordain your life. Your life was given to you, and it is yours to live, and not for another to tell you.
Some people have the idea that they are to tell you what to do, as if that is their role or their duty. It is not.
I, Who am God, gave you free will. That is the least another can do.
Do not interfere in another's life. You really don't want the responsibility for them and their decisions. Your decisions for them may come back to haunt you. You do not know what is right for another, contrary to what you may think.
You do not know what is right and what is wrong in your own life, let alone for another.
Do not set yourself up above another nor put yourself below. Be neither slave nor slave-master. Do not deal in other people's destinies.
Do not intervene in another's life. Do not placate. If someone learns a hard lesson, it was theirs to learn. Do not take that privilege away from them. That may be your lesson.
We are talking about responsibility here.
What are you truly responsible for? That is your domain.