I write a poem every night, pausing long over the blank page edged with gold. I love gold-paged books; they make me feel fancy, a medieval scribe with a brush dipped in ground lapis.
I write a poem every night, but often my mind yawns empty as I drop the nib to the sheet. As with divination, the answer comes, a silent tug that becomes a word. I find that I have something to say.
I write a poem every night, and I hate these poems.
I’m doing it wrong; all the professionals say so. A publisher would flinch and walk swiftly past the leper with her begging bowl. Real poets don’t count syllables and use internal rhyme. Real poets agonize over each word, sometimes jotting a line over several months because scarcity is gold. (I read that in a Q&A. “I used to write two poems a day,” he sniffed. “They sucked.”)
I write a poem every night, and I hate these poems. And yet, sometimes I flip through the gold-leafed pages, unremembering, and I read the scrawled words. “I wrote that?” I puzzle. If they were someone else’s words, they would be beautiful.
Should as a goddess of fate
These days, when I feel myself falling back into the feather cloak of silence, I feel about for the sharp prick of the lesson, because there is one. There is always a lesson in despair, just like every day has a poem if you wait and let the words come.
What need do I have that goes unmet in this moment?
Ah.
I have a hole in the heart of me that’s some kind of paradox of nature: Nothing I ever do is enough. Not good enough. Smart enough. Beautiful enough.
I should have done. I should. Look at all those people doing it better.
Oh, there’s a bottom to the hole. I know exactly where this dire being roots; I can trace its history just as we can trace the weather of ages through tree-rings. You can’t see those rings without cutting the tree down, but the tree knows: It has lived those years in that environment.
I’m an Enneagram Type 4, remember, and our vice is envy. Not of your house or your title or your lover, although we may want those things – the shine of the horizon that glitters on all we can’t have. The nature of this envy is tied with our fear: That we don’t mean anything at all. That who and what we are is a big fat nothing, and therefore everything we’ve ever done is a big, fat nothing, too.
I should have published a book, right? Or more poems. I mean, if I were good, I’d have some books out, right? Those people have books.
Shouldn’t you be more fluent in Irish by now? And why didn’t you go on for that graduate degree in religion? Too afraid about getting a job, you said. What a fainting daisy. Maybe you could do that now but “no, I have too many obligations and no time to sleep,” crying baby. If your music were any good, people would listen to it. You should host another drum circle. You should volunteer at church to prove your worth. You should practice your harp every day. You should master koshi already and do air-rolls by now, dumbass.
Why don’t you remember how to do the highland fling
you should you should you should
“Should” is an interesting word. It’s the past tense of the Old English sceal and Proto-Germanic *skul, which survives as “shall.” It’s linked to words for debt, guilt and obligation, and to Skuld, one of the Norns, with her sisters Urd (“fate”) and Verdandi (“happening”). Skuld is the youngest, and also flies among the Valkyries who choose the battle-slain.
Perhaps the meaning behind Skuld’s name is this: Our feelings of debt, guilt and obligation can determine the weave of our fate. And perhaps our feelings of debt, guilt and obligation lead us to the battlefield and the horrors there. We should fight this battle that someone else started, even if we pay its cost in blood and bone.
Urd, scholars say, was likely the original Norn. Should came along later, as shoulds always do.
The empathy cure
Maybe it’s not an Enneagram thing, not even a dominator thing, but a capitalist thing – rooted in the Puritans and a theology of spiritual perfectionism. You’re perfect if God loves you; if something should ever go awry, it’s because you’re a sinner … which was determined by an omniscient being before you even popped out.
Calvinism has always seemed utterly bizarre to me, but it’s one of the main philosophies undergirding American culture. Still. I mean, look around: In newspapers and social media, advertisements and common sentiment, the behaviors we reward in little kids.
Should is the handmaiden of conditional love. If you do everything right, you earn love like a paycheck. The person issuing that lovecheck could be Capitalist God, or romantic partners, parents, friends, the shining eyes of the faceless masses; in this model, love is a quid pro quo that you earn through perfection and navigating constantly shifting goalposts set there as some sort of test.
You should lose some weight. You should get some Botox. You should try these ten crazy tricks to please your man in the bedroom, or your boss in the boardroom. You should wash your sheets more: Here’s how often. You should change your diet: Here’s what we’re saying this week.
I actually had to stop reading the “lifestyle” section of newspapers on the regular because the shoulds were making me sick – about sheets, diets, dish detergent, how to talk to friends or run a marathon. All of these things that we should want and aspire to, an ever-changing list of rules that would dazzle Deuteronomy.
Rather than a Greek chorus, we have a Puritan chorus, decked out in bonnets and buckled hats: If we just analyze every thought word and deed – if we just combed over every fault and mistake and condemned it as sin – if we just followed every rule and thought the right thoughts, we would be perfect and blessed by God. And all good things would come to us because we are blessed. We would never age or die, we would never know want because when you are perfect you are loved by God –
This sentiment survives today as the “Health and Wealth Gospel,” which I like to think of as “the empathy cure.” As in: I am cured of empathy because if your life isn’t absolutely wonderful, it’s because you’re bad and we all hate you.
That’s the threat behind “should,” isn’t it? If you don’t obey and follow the rules, everybody will hate you. Sometimes we’re told this, especially as kids and especially if we stand out in some unusual way: gender or sexual nonconformity, for example, or the quirks, cognitive differences and mental health conditions that get labeled “neurodivergence,” all of which are part of the regular human spectrum.
Here’s the thing: Unless we’re identical twins, we’re all different from one another; sameness is something reserved for the manufacturing line. No living being is “perfect” because nothing in the material world can embody an abstract concept, and that’s what “perfection” is: a blueprint, not the actual article. Fact.
Personality typing = astrology for smart people (I hear)
Should is the Kryptonite to my Superman. If you present me with a list of shoulds, I have this compulsion to fulfill each one to the letter – even if they’re contradictory, even if I drive myself to illness or worse.
The Enneagram people would say that this is because I am a “social 4,” motivated by shame and a weird internal need to earn love through suffering. I’m not entirely sold on the Enneagram system; it oversimplifies and is quite frankly harsh to Type 4s. Sometimes, I think the system was created by a salty Type 9 as a way to rank their prior romantic entanglements; their liaison with 4 apparently didn’t end well, and the 4 probably wrote a poem or released an entire album about the end of that affair.
Basically, the Enneagram is a personality typing system; Meyers-Briggs seems to work better in this regard, perhaps due to the simple fact that it contains 16 types rather than 9. And yes, the Enneagram – if I am remembering correctly – really was invented by a Type 9, and therefore seems to consider Type 9s as the pinnacle of human experience (and the personality type most often evidenced by the therapists who use it). One of the two creators of Meyers-Briggs, on the other hand, was an INFP – basically a subset of Enneagram Type 4.
Well, I guess we all write ourselves into the hero position.
The Enneagram has one advantage over Meyers-Briggs in that it focuses on the early experiences – and quite frankly wounds – that shape our personalities, and on the burdens these personalities impose on the self and others. Meyers-Briggs, on the other hand, focuses on the gifts that come with each type – in my case: creativity, compassion, idealism.
The Enneagram, however, is spot-on about the kind of wounds that shaped my personality, and my focus on connection.
When I think back on my childhood, I often describe myself as “the town pariah.” I suppose that’s what you get when you’re a nonconformist in a dominator world, especially if you’re a girl. Probably because of the patriarchal nature of our culture, we don’t even have an image of female social non-compliance, other than “madwoman in the attic” and “whore.” Tortured artist and romantic rebel are traditionally male preserves, since women are supposed to be wives, mothers and caretakers.
Because of this history, I react really badly to statements of “everyone hates you.” I mean, I’ve pretty much lived that social reality and it’s a whole lot of suck. (A related poem: The time I got lost in the woods in Vermont and had the damnedest time convincing fellow humans to help. It’s not the only time I’ve been lost in far-away places and had people refuse to help, sadly.)
My worst nightmares are always variants of “everybody hates you.”
So, yeah, expressions of that sentiment can suck me into quite an agitated, overreactive spiral. Because I become convinced that everybody does indeed hate me and will leave me in the woods or living in a cardboard box or whatever.
Considering that humans are social animals, it’s probably understandable as a primal fear. I would guess that my enslavement to the shoulds is somewhat connected to this – but so is our culture’s definition of love and belonging as an earned quality, something precious and eternally in short supply.
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
A focus on shoulds and perfectionism, on sin and salvation, suits both dominator systems and capitalism. We desperately scrape and bow to earn the regard of those higher up on the hierarchy, and that’s entirely by design.
On one hand, it puts us in a position of eternal servitude and exalts the bully as the image of God, enforcing conformity and obedience. Desperate for relief, we will focus on the externals – the things we buy – as a way to a more holy state.
That includes lipstick and Botox and fancy sheets, sure. In the old days, it included actual passage to heaven: You paid real money to the Church to “buy” your way out of purgatory, which is why I avoid the word “mercy”; the root is merx, or merchandise, something that’s bought and sold. In a capitalist society, we only accord value to something with an actual pricetag; offered freely, love and salvation would be valueless.
In a hyper-individualistic culture, we view health and well-being solely in terms of the individual: occasionally genetics, often life-choices and whether we fulfill the shoulds. Our “cures” are individual, too: medication, therapy, personal adaptation.
We don’t look at systems of connection that lead to sickness and dysfunction in the first place. We don’t look at the long-tail impact of conditional love – on individual persons, on groups of people, on society as a whole.
What if … we just accepted people as they are, in this moment, without trying to change them? What if we viewed mistakes as learning opportunities and not as proof of our damnation by the Capitalist God of Eternal Productivity?
White Cat Grove 
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