The Trouble with “It Shouldn’t Be This Way.”

“freedom watch” 2024, part 3

I chose a guiding word for 2024—the word freedom. I’m reflecting on the word freedom regularly in the Blue Room, to see how it’s guiding and challenging my life. 

Part 1: freedom means accepting difficulty but reducing misery
Part 2: freedom means doing nothing extra
Below is the third installment.

I’m a One on the Enneagram. Sometimes we’re called the Perfectionist, but I’ve never liked that label. Certainly I have those tendencies, but they’re highly compartmentalized. My house is dusty and moderately cluttered; I’m frequently late to stuff; the bookkeeping for my coaching/speaking work is World’s Okayest, and I’m mostly fine with all that. Instead, I prefer the label of the One as the Reformer or the Improver. We’re driven by a desire (OK, a compulsion) to make things better, and when we see something amiss, it’s not an idle noticing—it gets into our brain and is hard to let go. This is especially true for things we deeply care about. 

At a time when life is objectively better for most of the human population than it has been at any other time in history, some of us find it hard to celebrate that, or even remember it (and not just Ones). Because the gap between potential and reality feels so vast. Because we still allow solvable problems to persist. Mental health professionals are now seeing clients present with climate anxiety, which comes from knowing what’s coming yet seeing how slow we are to respond.

Yes, the bubonic plague killed some 50% of the population in Europe in just a few short years, a level of misery we can scarcely imagine. But that happened before modern germ theory—they did the best they could. Our “best” has expanded, and so should our capacity. And yet. As writer John Green puts it, we’re powerful enough to warm the entire planet but somehow not powerful enough to stop warming it.

“This shouldn’t be.” It’s a kind of low-grade moral injury, and again, you don’t have to be a One on the Enneagram (or even know what the Enneagram is) to feel that. As painful as this shouldn’t be is, I will defend our right to feel it, provided those feelings are fuel for meaningful action. This shouldn’t be—and I will do whatever small thing I can to change it. Or at least protest it. Or at least provide comfort and support to those going through it. 

However. And this is a big however:

This shouldn’t be can also keep us stuck, to the point that we end up arguing with reality itself.

I’ve had people want to hire me to help them “be more disciplined.” Some will even say, “I’m gonna need you to hold my feet to the fire, coach!” These are people who hold down jobs and keep themselves clothed and fed, they care for loved ones and often exercise and maybe even do creative work. But there’s a little splinter of this shouldn’t be in their minds, because disciplined people get up early and read devotional books instead of scrolling Instagram, or they write a haiku every day instead of a couple times a week, or they run marathons instead of walking in the woods. 

And sure, coaching can help build some intentionality around what we do. But not by holding one’s feet to the fire. That feels punishing, and not the way of freedom. As my own coach will sometimes say, “Consider the possibility that you’re not doing it wrong.” Maybe I’m just doing it my way. Who’s to say my late-sleeping client isn’t better able to be present to friends and coworkers because she’s not kicking herself out of bed before she’s ready? 

The problem is all these externally imposed, societally-rewarded shoulds and shouldn’ts. We accede to the culture’s definition of normal, internalizing it so thoroughly that we convince ourselves it’s something we want, or at least are supposed to want. Much of my coaching work involves untangling ourselves from that cultural lie. Again, it’s fine to want to grow, but do you really want it, or have you been convinced by voices outside yourself that you’re not good enough?

An event planner I know works with an organization that will gather later this year, with a fraction of the numbers they had before covid. It would be easy to see that as a failure, or assume that the leaders have done something wrong by not bringing in the numbers they used to. But this person knows that the intimate size of this event will allow them to relate to one another in much more powerful ways, and the organization could be radically renewed as a result. adrienne maree brown reminds us that we live in a world that values mile-wide, inch-deep thinking, but the real transformation happens at an inch wide and a mile deep.  

My eldest child, my husband, and I attended small, private liberal arts universities with a strong campus culture and community life, and we all absolutely loved it. (Eldest still has a year to go, plus an additional year for a master’s degree.) It’s becoming increasingly clear that our middle child, who graduates high school next year, doesn’t want that kind of college experience, despite having the academic chops for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid ended up going to college part time while working; or attending community college and then transferring to a four-year university. Going through what this kid has gone through has aged them such that they’re ready to get on with adulthood. They’ll happily forgo club soccer and dorm drama in favor of living off campus with cats and Chip. As parents, we’re called upon to see that as a different path, not a violation of some unspoken rule about “what Danas do.” 

Robert and I attended a class on parenting kids with anxiety, and in the final session, the psychologist showed us two pictures and said, “We parent as if the world looks like this…”

“…but what if it looked like this…”

It’s not easy to trust that second picture. Capitalism isn’t just an economic system, but a mentality that channels us into the idea that there are right ways and wrong ways to be successful… heck, to be human. This psychologist, a PhD in an office full of PhDs, said “None of us got here via the same route as anyone else.” It got me thinking about improv, and how we talk about finding our Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work out. But even that terminology implies a default from which we must deviate. What if all the paths are Plan A?

Freedom, in other words, invites me to reject the shoulds and to condemn the fiction that there’s one right way to do things—a collective fiction we’ve all written together, but one we can rewrite if we have the will to do so.

~

Your Turn

• Where do you find yourself experiencing this shouldn’t be?

• How might we rewrite the story we all live in?

What I’m Up To

I’ll be preaching on Sunday at 10:15 EDT at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Herndon—visit us in person or via livestream.

Supporting subscribers, don’t forget Monday’s gathering at high noon (EDT) to talk allostasis! Here’s the article (available to everyone) plus Zoom link. Let me know if you have any questions about joining the call. It’s a good time to upgrade—I’m giving 50% of new subscriptions to World Central Kitchen for their work in Gaza.