Life may not have turned out as she hoped, but Kerry isn't sore

WHEN I was a child I thought I'd be a woman with a job that involved holding a portfolio with sketched designs in it of either clothes or houses or both.

I'd wear sharp lady suits, with big-rimmed hats and have a cat on a lead. The visuals were mainly inspired by Athena posters.

I don't remember if I had a husband in this fantasy. I assume so, but he didn't take shape until I was into my teens. By then the spouse-shaped hole in my projections had started to take the form of Judd Nelson in the Breakfast Club.

But my version of Judd was a London DJ or a musician or an artist of some kind. He wore very baggy jeans and cool trainers and was probably a bit mean, which in teenage girl land is just perfect.

I think we lived in a studio flat and ate pitta bread with taramasalata for most meals, this being a childhood treat that I thought I'd eat on tap once I was grown up.

Of course, I grew out of these expectations, but I only replaced them with new ones, most just as unlikely or stupid.

Mostly my expectations are influenced by books or films and adverts. They look like a gaudy collage of battles between my emotions and my intellect; between my optimism and my sense of doom.

My expectations didn't just stop with my own selfish aspirations either. When my mum took me on free Mandela and CND marches as a kid I started to politicise. Who cares if I was only ten?
An utopia grew in my child mind where there would be no injustice or starvation or weapons for war. People would be kind and look after each other. Children all over the world would have enough pitta bread and taramasalata to fill their empty bellies for ever.

I also swore I'd never smoke cigarettes. Needless to say, all of the above didn't work out. Well, apart from Mandela being free.

Buddhists recommend that we relinquish all our expectations. That they only lead to pain, as life will never match up. But they fail to go on to tell us where the off switch is.

Everyone gets disappointed now and then. Most grown ups have learned to live with it. The trick is to not get so disappointed you become a cynic.
Don't end up with such low expectations that you're never surprised when things turn out crap. That's an awful way to live, far too grim.
My life as a grown-up isn't what I expected. I'm not married to Judd Nelson, but I've got a great boy-friend who's never even seen the Breakfast Club.

I'm not a fancy designer, I'm a comedian, who doesn't have a portfolio, but scraps of paper with silly jokes on them. No cat. No hat. No studio flat. But life is good.

We still have war and hideous injustice, which my younger self would have raged at. She would never have believed her older self could tolerate such a troubled world. But her older self has to.

You do your bit and accept the deficit between what you expect and the real world. Just keep aspiring. Now, where's my CND banner.

• Kerry Godliman presents her debut full-length Fringe show, This Isn't What I Was Expecting, at the Pleasance – Joker Dome, Potterow, until August 25 (not 13), 5pm, £5-£9.50, 0131-556 6550