Burning the shoulds...

I was talking to a friend of mine tonight who is pregnant. We were discussing diet and exercise when I mentioned that when I get pregnant I want to exercise a lot, not drink Coke, cook more, eat fruits and vegetables, not eat fast food, and not stress about money- all things I don't currently do. So, basically, I am privately telling myself that I want to be someone else when I get pregnant. These are all good things in this case, but the setting of such high expectations is dooming myself to failure. I've already created for myself a future of feeling like a bad parent, and I'm not even close to being one yet.

I know I've blogged about this before, but I guess until that moment I never realized just how deep my expectations for myself and my life reach. No wonder so many of us are unhappy. We all do it. We all place rules on how everything should be. This includes how others should be. No wonder so many people are angry when things don't turn out the way they wanted. No wonder so many people are prejudiced and mean to others who don't act the way they expected. No wonder so many people aren't satisfied, marry for the wrong reasons, have kids for the wrong reasons. They are living inside these boundaries that don't even exist. Boundaries created to make us feel good about ourselves. But they don't. They end up making us feel bad about ourselves, because we can never live up to them for one reason. We will never be able to predict the future. Therefore, how can we make such rules for ourselves?

My life coach currently has a really rad quote as her email signature, so I'm going to steal it and share it. "We must be willing to give up the life we planned so as to have the life that's waiting for us."- Joseph Campbell I thought about this more as I journaled tonight, and I wrote, if there is one thing I do with this life, I want it to be being true to myself. What else have I got? So in order to better throw out- no, burn- the shoulds in my head, I decided to write them all down every time one slips through. Hopefully, this will make me more aware of them, thereby, releasing me from them. What a freeing thought!

In reviewing the whole day, I came up with 15 shoulds, though I'm certain there were more:

I should get up early and help my husband.
I should move my car.
I should get to work early.
I should eat breakfast.
I should sleep.
I should dye my hair.
I should not spend money. x2
I should be teaching better. x2
I should dress better.
I should spend more time on my hair.
I should say hi to someone I know when I see them in the library.
I should not drink so much Coke.
I should drink more water.
I should work on my current art project.
I should know what aperture and focal length are.

In applying this to my writing, I came up with three more:
My stories should be long.
My stories should be "good".
My stories should be written in silent seclusion.

No wonder I'm scared to try.


I am so in love with outside right now. I always am but with the weather cooling down and finally feeling like true fall, I could spend all day outside. I love the look of the sky at dusk. It feels so majestic. I tried to capture that in this photo. It didn't come out as I wanted, but I got a cool lens flare effect that I wasn't expecting. ;)