Q. Dear Goddess: Over the 4th-of-July weekend, looking at everyone having fun on the beach, I had a meltdown. I thought: I should have a boyfriend. I should be thinner. I should be closer to my family. I should be roming on the beach with a wonderful drink and, oh you know the rest…… Help!
—Melted Down
A. Dear Melted Down, Oh Dear. That’s the Should Voice. It’s a little but loud internalized Monster, and we’re getting rid of her/him (note how careful I am not to assign a gender to a Monster) right now.
This Should Voice always speaks out the loudest over a holiday, when everything’s supposed to be just wonderful and everyone is supposed to be sooooo happy and all your friends and family sooooo loving. And then, add the Beach thing, and everyone else looks soooo much better than you and you beat yourself up for not being fit and not having goddesslike thighs that even this goddess, The Love Goddess, no less, doesn’t have. The key to getting rid of the voice is to notice where it’s coming from. It’s coming from an idealized notion of things; a mythical place that never was, and never will be, but that the voice insists can be.
Darling Earth Girl, I won’t waste your time by reminding you that How Life Should Be is How Life Definitely Isn’t. All families are not happily frolicking while you, alone and not skinny, are doomed to be left out. The Should Voice always makes you feel left out; that’s its function: to make you think you should be different so you’re NOT left out. But I promise you, the should voice must be shut up, or it will never let you go. If you’re thinner, it’ll tell you to be fitter. If you’re with a boyfriend, it will point out some other girl’s boyfriend who looks better–more prosperous, more loving, more something. There’s no end to the unhappiness imposed on you by this voice.
This internalized catalog of expectations comes from deep in the bones of the culture, and while it might have been your mother who first voiced them, or your father, all you can do now is stop it in its tracks. It speaks of an idealized happpiness that no one, NO ONE, has. So please, for me, remember that. If you don’t, you’ll be bossed around by that voice forever, and happiness–real, earthly, mundane, prosaic, ordinary, flawed happiness–will elude you. Because that kind of happiness is not good enough for the Should Voice. Nothing is.
