Everyone in life has expectations. Everyone dreams big and rarely ever does it follow through. In “Parallel” by Lauren Miller, the characters, just like real people, also face many situations where their reality is totally different to what they thought would happen to them. In the book, Abby, the female protagonist’s life is shown from two different perspectives. One being her life and the other, her parallel’s (a copy of herself in another world). Abby, being a teenage girl, often tends to over think simple situations and has great aspirations that don’t carry through. In this book, Lauren Miller uses inner thinking and symbolism to show how our expectations generally don’t match our realities, either negatively or positively.
In the beginning of the book it is mentioned that Abby had a plan. This plan wasn’t just any plan. It was ‘The Plan’. “The one that has informed every scholastic decision I’ve made since seventh grade, the year I decided I wanted to be a journalist.” This plan consisted of Abby going to Northwestern, majoring in in Journalism and landing a job at a national newspaper company, all before she turned twenty two. How she was going to do this; “a perfectly crafted combination of AP classes and total fluff electives with legit-sounding names.” Subsequently, Abby realised that one of the electives she chose, for her perfect resume, was canceled as the teacher wasn’t available. She had the choice of talking Astronomy or Drama instead, but neither would have helped her with her future career. She chose drama but her parallel took Astronomy. Both of these electives lead her to many wild and much different experiences than she would have ever imagined in the way she planned her life.‘The Plan’ in this book symbolises our perfect expectations and later how they can be changed by opposing ideas or our reality.
In addition to ‘The Plan’ Lauren Miller also uses inner thinking to describe how different expectations and reality can be. When Abby was talking to Josh, the guy she liked, about Megan, another girl who liked Josh, he seemed very hesitant about it. “Hope it works out! Obviously not.” She thought to herself as she replayed the conversation in her head. Immediately she expected that her chances with Josh were ruined by the conversation she had with him. Eventually, Josh explained to Abby that he actually did have feelings for her but was just unsure of what to say when she started to talk to him about another girl. Abby jumped to an abstract conclusion without understanding what she needed to understand. How Josh really felt. Without knowing much, she created unreal expectations which just made her more unsettled. This illustrates how the expectations we create in our head don’t seem to match what ends up happening.
When Lauren Miller was introducing Tyler, one of Abby’s first and best friends, she described him as a “walking contradiction”. She used different stereotypes as symbols and each of these symbols contradicted each other making our expectations of who Tyler would be, change by reality of him being something else, in the same sentence. She described him as “The city boy who plays competitive croquet” or “The jock who refuses to Jay walk”. When one hears city boy or jock, they begin to believe that this person is someone at at the top of the food chain. The popular kid. But when you hear competitive croquet and refusing to jaywalk you think of the complete opposite causing these stereotypes to conflict against each other. Each of these stereotypes symbolises a specific type of person that we expect to see but are contradicted by the reality of the opposite, telling us that sometimes our expectations don’t match our realities even in one single person.
In conclusion, Lauren Miller describes how different our expectations and realities can be using inner thinking and symbolism. It is true that sometimes our expectations and realities can overlap but that rarely ever happens. One thing that can cause reality falling short of expectations is overthinking. I personally over think situations too much and create these fantasies in my head which cause me to feel frustrated when the experiences don’t come true. Once we understand the power of our minds creation, we should be aware about what we expect so that if reality end ups falling short we won’t get upset. Sometimes though, our expectations can help us to dream big and aspire to accomplish great things. This leave the reader with the question, whether it is good to create expectations or not? and if so, what is the limit?
By Aditi
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