The delicate art of musturbation

This morning I found myself musing about when was best to take the dogs for a morning run. I’d just read a book that said dogs should have two walks a day so had decided to try to fit a morning run into my schedule. ‘Maybe I should have taken them when I first got up instead of walking round the yard with them,’ I thought. ‘Maybe I should have taken them before I made my breakfast.’ When I heard the ‘should’ word popping up more than once my mental ears pricked up. This is often a sign that I’m ‘musturbating’ – putting pressure on myself to meet a high standard or finding fault with what I’ve done, something I experienced all too often when I was growing up.

I’m not automatically opposed to using the word ‘should’. Most of the time it’s fine, just a recognition of something that happened, like ‘I should have brought the washing in when the sky clouded over and it wouldn’t have got wet’. I think it’s easy to get too religiously strict about using ‘should’, like the friend of mine who once told me ‘that woman says ‘should’ all the time – she should know that she shouldn’t say ‘should’ ‘! When it gets that prescriptive the point is lost. Which is that ‘shoulding’ can be a way of beating myself up that makes me feel bad.

So this morning I asked myself ‘have I crossed the line into self-criticism here?’ The answer seemed to be ‘no, not quite’. I could tell this because I didn’t feel bad or harassed. I was still at the stage of thinking about things in a neutral way, trying to work out what time would work best for the dogs’ run. In the end I decided that it did make more sense to take them after breakfast. But it reminded me how easily ‘should’ can slip into ‘musturbation’ and become a stick we beat ourselves up with.