All the Necessary Messy Parts

Healing Doesn’t Happen in Neat Little Boxes — It Happens in the Mess

I was cracked wide open. Completely torn apart, all the pieces of me I thought I knew or understood shaken to their very core.

Convinced I was irreparably broken, I set out to figure out what the hell happened. Why did life suddenly turn on its head and how exactly am I supposed to pick up all the pieces? What did I do wrong?? It took me a long time to realize that there was nothing wrong with me. That what I was experiencing was actually pretty normal given my history and circumstances. This is the part that no one seems to want to talk about.

Life is shown to us in a collage of “before and afters”, images of lives transformed beyond recognition, and all they had to do was follow “these few easy steps”. The real picture behind the transformations is distorted, blurred, left out of the story because it’s too messy, too ugly, too uncomfortable. People don’t want to share the ugly parts. We’ve convinced ourselves that nobody wants to see them, that we are alone in dealing with them and can’t share outside ourselves. Like we will push people away, freak people out, or somehow disgrace ourselves by showing the truth behind the instagram feed.

But that’s where the magic is — in sharing our stories.

Falling into the Big Shift

If one thing was clear from my massive crash out-burnout combo of a breakdown, it was that something major needed to change. I couldn’t keep going how I was, and I really didn’t want to, anyways. Nothing felt right anymore and I was questioning literally everything that I had been doing with myself up to that point.

I needed to do some serious introspection and soul-searching.

There were other factors that played a role in the meltdown, but ultimately it was just a poorly timed culmination of bad medication changes and burnout to the nth degree. I want to say that “it was just too much” but that doesn’t exactly feel right. It’s not really that things were “too much”, but that the way I was handling them — or not— wasn’t working. I’d kept my head down and poured myself into building a business that wasn’t serving me, and wasn’t where my heart was. I had always seen it as a means to an end, something that would help me get to the place that I’d be able to focus on doing the things that I love. But in doing so, I left no room to actually do the things I love, and was running myself so ragged there was no space to consider my mental or physical health.

The way we handle things is just as important as the things themselves. We can build entire lives around avoiding what’s going on right in front of us, but eventually they will crumble, and we’ll be forced to deal with those things in a much worse situation than we would have if we’d just been straight with it in the first place.

In all the work I was doing, I was chasing a version of life that wasn’t my own. It was sort of what I wanted, but colored a little differently than what I had always imagined for myself. Certain things took on different shades and shapes and eventually, it became something warped, something just as distorted as all those things I had always wanted to get away from.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certain aspects to that vision of life that I still want. I want a big life, but not so big that it can’t also be peaceful and quiet. I want to pursue my dreams of being a writer, artist, poet, and creator, and maybe open a little shop to sell my work. Something that fills my cup every day, and gives me space to go on adventures, spend time with my people, and just breathe. But there’s not only one way do to this. The stories I had believed about what it takes to live the kind of life I want were only one way, not the full picture.

Building the Plane While Flying it

Changing everything about your life isn’t something that just happens. It’s not something that you can just do overnight. It takes time, effort, consistency, and a lot of fucking patience and belief. Life is going to try and convince you that you can’t do it, throw every curveball your way, but you can’t let it stop you from doing what’s actually best for you.

Nothing about it is easy. I’ve spent so many nights wondering what the fuck I’m doing, if I made the wrong choice, if I’m ever going to get where I want to go. There are days I want to give up and “go back to the way things were”, even though I know that’s not really an option. But there are also days when I have so much hope and optimism for the future, days I really believe in what I’m doing or trying to do… days when I really believe in myself. Not in what someone else sees in me, not for the things I can do for someone for their approval, but fully in me.

There’s a quote from a poem by Warsan Shire that dug its claws into me with its truth and simplicity. I belong deeply to myself. It became my mantra. Something I would remind myself of in those darks moments when everything seemed so bleak. An anchor to hold on to.

After so much time spent trying to get myself together for other people, I finally allowed myself to come home to me. It’s not that I don’t want or need validation or approval from others — I’m human. But whether or not I have it no longer determines what I decide to do with my life.

I had made myself shrink, shut out entire parts of me and who I am to be more palatable, more acceptable to what I thought were “the right” people. But the question always rattled in me… why did I need to hide any of me at all? If these people were truly my people, why did I feel the need to temper my beliefs, my opinions, my truth? I’d shut myself out of talking about things that are deeply important to me, tried to shape and mold myself into this perfect figure that radiated confidence in spite of all my insecurities — hiding them rather than embracing them. At the same time that I was censoring myself, I was also betraying and abandoning myself. You can only do that for so long before something snaps and you have to find another way.

To learn how to accept yourself, as a whole.

It May Be Simple, But it’s Not Easy

So, the changes began.

Slowly, and rather painfully if I’m being honest. I had no idea what I was doing and kept catching myself trying to pretend like I did. I didn’t want to give up everything I had built, fully immersed in a sunken cost fallacy of my own making. I’d spent years building up this “persona”, this image of me online, this business that wasn’t really a business, and held this belief that I would be missing out on something by letting go of it.

It took some time, therapy, and yes, more soul-searching, to finally realize how much holding on to this thing was holding me back from a much wider world that I’d been ignoring.

I just want to be free. Everything that I have done has been in an effort to buy myself some semblance of freedom, some kind of room to move around as I see fit. But it seems like these days, in order to have any kind of freedom, you also have to have time and money that most of us don’t have. My dream is to be able to create freely, to live a life of creativity and wonder, and be able to do so beyond the little pockets of time that we have. A huge part of the changes I had to make was realizing this was going to be a whole different ballgame. I wasn’t going to have the same kind of support or community, I wouldn’t have access to the same resources, or really any of the things I was used to. I’d be doing this with a much smaller circle, but mostly on my own.

That realization rocked me a little bit, but it also made me grateful for what I do have and the simple fact that I still have the ability to shape my life after my own vision.

And truth be told, I’m still figuring that vision out.

Taking myself out of someone else’s vision for my life left some gaps, but I’m learning how to fill them my own way.

Nothing Else to Do But Move

Right now, I am firmly planted smack dab in the middle of figuring shit out.

That messy, ugly part no one wants to share… for some reason, I want to share it. It feels important somehow. Like sharing this part of myself will help me continue to heal, and maybe help someone else too. If I get to create a life where I can share my experience through art and poetry or storytelling, that feels like a win to me. A really big win.

Life has a way of taking us for a ride that we never expected.

It takes us all over the place, and we kind of just have to deal with it. But we do have more control over our lives than we often give ourselves credit for, and personally, I’d like to do something with that. My life may not look how I thought it was going to, it may not be what other people expected of me, but it’s mine.

And I belong deeply to myself.