A few days ago I wrote about my brainmates What If and If Then, but I neglected to mention their buddy Should. So Should came for a visit today to remind me how unhappy it was that I left it out. And it was rather insensitive of me, considering how much Should tries to help me–emphasis on the word tries.

You see, Should intends to help by doing its best to make me follow the rules. (Even if, as I also wrote about previously, the rules exist only in my head.) Sometimes Should is genuinely useful, like when it reminds me to do things that I actually need to do or not do: You should brush your teeth. You should not eat that second slice of cake. You should take a second to calm down before you yell at your kid. But Should often tells me to do or feel things that are definitely not useful: You should be sad about this because everyone else is. You should get together with that person you don’t really like because it would make the person happy. You should do three loads of laundry today because your family is counting on you to provide them with clean clothes even though it’ll make you crazy grouchy if you try to cram that in to your already full day and that’s not what we need now, is it? And on and on and on it goes.

As you might imagine, Should doing its thing that much is a big problem. I’ve tried telling it to stop, but it’s learned to tune that word out. So I’m learning to be a little more specific, and to ask it questions. Why should I feel sad just because it seems like a lot of other people are? Are there really as many people feeling sad about this as I think? And even if I feel differently, what’s wrong with that? There aren’t any rules that say how to feel about this. Should doesn’t like it when I ask those questions. Ah, c’mon! Why you gotta do that? Those questions are too hard, it says. So it shuts up for a little bit, and I get some peace and quiet. And then I ask myself, What should I do with this peace and quiet?

Oh no.